Often of a Saturday afternoon Ellen went to visit Miss Mitchell and her mother, and really preferred them to friends of her own age.  Miss Mitchell had a store of superannuated paper dolls which dated from her own childhood.  Their quaint costumes, and old-fashioned coiffures, and simpers were of overwhelming interest to Ellen.  Even at that early age she had a perception of the advantages of an atmosphere to art, and even to the affections.  Without understanding it, she loved those obsolete paper-dolls and those women of former generations better because they gave her breathing-scope for her imagination.  She could love Abby Atkins and Floretta Vining at one bite, as it were, and that was the end of it, but she could sit and ponder and dream over Miss Mitchell and her mother, and see whole vistas of them in receding mirrors of affection.

As for the teacher and her mother, they simply adored the child—­as indeed everybody did.  She continued at her first school for a year, which was one of the hardest financially ever experienced in Rowe.  Norman Lloyd during all that time did not reopen his factory, and in the autumn two others shut down.  The streets were full of the discontented ranks of impotent labor, and all the public buildings were props for the weary shoulders of the unemployed.  On pleasant days the sunny sides of the vacant factories, especially, furnished settings for lines of scowling faces of misery.

This atmosphere affected Ellen more than any one realized, since the personal bearing of it was kept from her.  She did not know that her father was drawing upon his precious savings for daily needs, she did not know how her aunt Eva and her uncle Jim were getting into greater difficulties every day, but she was too sensitive not to be aware of disturbances which were not in direct contact with herself.  She never forgot what she had overheard that night Lloyd’s had shut down; it was always like a blot upon the face of her happy consciousness of life.  She often overheard, as then, those loud, dissenting voices of her father and his friends in the sitting-room, after she had gone to bed; and then, too, Abby Atkins, who was not spared any knowledge of hardship, told her a good deal.  “It’s awful the way them rich folks treat us,” said Abby Atkins.  “They own the shops and everything, and take all the money, and let our folks do all the work.  It’s awful.  But then,” continued Abby Atkins, comfortingly, “your father has got money saved in the bank, and he owns his house, so you can get along if he don’t have work.  My father ’ain’t got any, and he’s got the old-fashioned consumption, and he coughs, and it takes money for his medicine.  Then mother’s sick a good deal too, and has to have medicine.  We have to have more medicine than most anything else, and we hardly ever have any pie or cake, and it’s all the fault of them rich folks.”  Abby Atkins wound up with a tragic climax and a fierce roll of her black eyes.