That evening Ellen went in to see her grandmother, and was presented with some cookies, which she did not eat.

“Why don’t you eat them?” Mrs. Zelotes asked.

“Can I have them to do just what I want to with?” asked Ellen.

“What on earth do you want to do with a cooky except eat it?” Ellen blushed; she had a shamed-faced feeling before a contemplated generosity.

“What do you want to do with them except eat them?” her grandmother asked, severely.

“Abby Atkins don’t have any cookies ’cause her father’s out of work,” said Ellen, abashedly.

“Did that Atkins girl ask you to bring her cookies?”

“No, ma’am.”

“You can do jest what you are a mind to with ’em,” Mrs. Zelotes said, abruptly.

Ellen never knew why her grandmother insisted upon her drinking a little glass of very nice and very spicy cordial before she went home, but the truth was, that Mrs. Zelotes thought the child so angelic in this disposition to give up the cookies which she loved to her little friend that she was straightway alarmed and thought her too good to live.

The next day she told Fanny, and said to her, with her old face stern with anxiety, that the child was lookin’ real pindlin’, and Ellen had to take bitters for a month afterwards because she gave the cookies to Abby Atkins.

Chapter XIII

In all growth there is emulation and striving for precedence between the spiritual and the physical, and this very emulation may determine the rate of progression of the whole.  Sometimes the one, sometimes the other, may be in advance, but all the time the tendency is towards the distant goal.  Sometimes the two keep abreast, and then there is the greatest harmony in speed.  In Ellen Brewster at twelve and fifteen the spiritual outstripped the physical, as is often the case.  Her eyes grew intense and hollow with reflection under knitting brows, her thin shoulders stooped like those of a sage bent with study and contemplation.  She was slender to emaciation; her clothes hung loosely over her form, which seemed as sexless as a lily-stem; indeed, her body seemed only made for the head, which was flower-like and charming, but almost painful in its delicacy, and with such weight of innocent pondering upon the unknown conditions of things in which she found herself.  At times, of course, there were ebullitions of youthful spirit, and the child was as inconsequent as a kitten.  At those times she was neither child nor woman; she was an anomalous thing made up not so much of actualities as of instincts.  She romped with her mates as unseen and uncomprehended of herself as any young animal, but the flame of her striving spirit made everything full of unread meaning.

Ellen was accounted a most remarkable scholar.  She had left Miss Mitchell’s school, and was in one of a higher grade.  At fifteen she entered the high-school and had a master.