The Kentons | Page 6

was able to interpret him to his father when
his intolerable dignity forbade a common understanding between them.
When he got so far beyond his depth that he did not know what he
meant himself, as sometimes happened, she gently found him a safe
footing nearer shore.
Kenton's theory was that he did not distinguish among his children. He
said that he did not suppose they were the best children in the world,
but they suited him; and he would not have known how to change them
for the better. He saw no harm in the behavior of Lottie when it most
shocked her brother; he liked her to have a good time; but it flattered
his nerves to have Ellen about him. Lottie was a great deal more
accomplished, he allowed that; she could play and sing, and she had
social gifts far beyond her sister; but he easily proved to his wife that
Nelly knew ten times as much.
Nelly read a great deal; she kept up with all the magazines, and knew
all the books in his library. He believed that she was a fine German
scholar, and in fact she had taken up that language after leaving school,
when, if she had been better advised than she could have been in
Tuskingum, she would have kept on with her French. She started the

first book club in the place; and she helped her father do the intellectual
honors of the house to the Eastern lecturers, who always stayed with
the judge when they came to Tuskingum. She was faithfully present at
the moments, which her sister shunned in derision, when her father
explained to them respectively his theory of regimental history, and
would just, as he said, show them a few of the documents he had
collected. He made Ellen show them; she knew where to put her hand
on the most characteristic and illustrative; and Lottie offered to bet
what one dared that Ellen would marry some of those lecturers yet; she
was literary enough.
She boasted that she was not literary herself, and had no use for any
one who was; and it could not have been her culture that drew the most
cultivated young man in Tuskingum to her. Ellen was really more
beautiful; Lottie was merely very pretty; but she had charm for them,
and Ellen, who had their honor and friendship, had no charm for them.
No one seemed drawn to her as they were drawn to her sister till a man
came who was not one of the most cultivated in Tuskingum; and then it
was doubtful whether she was not first drawn to him. She was too
transparent to hide her feeling from her father and mother, who saw
with even more grief than shame that she could not hide it from the
man himself, whom they thought so unworthy of it.
He had suddenly arrived in Tuskingum from one of the villages of the
county, where he had been teaching school, and had found something
to do as reporter on the Tuskingum 'Intelligencer', which he was
instinctively characterizing with the spirit of the new journalism, and
was pushing as hardily forward on the lines of personality as if he had
dropped down to it from the height of a New York or Chicago Sunday
edition. The judge said, with something less than his habitual honesty,
that he did not mind his being a reporter, but he minded his being light
and shallow; he minded his being flippant and mocking; he minded his
bringing his cigarettes and banjo into the house at his second visit. He
did not mind his push; the fellow had his way to make and he had to
push; but he did mind his being all push; and his having come out of
the country with as little simplicity as if he had passed his whole life in
the city. He had no modesty, and he had no reverence; he had no
reverence for Ellen herself, and the poor girl seemed to like him for
that.

He was all the more offensive to the judge because he was himself to
blame for their acquaintance, which began when one day the fellow had
called after him in the street, and then followed down the shady
sidewalk beside him to his hour, wanting to know what this was he had
heard about his history, and pleading for more light upon his plan in it.
At the gate he made a flourish of opening and shutting it for the judge,
and walking up the path to his door he kept his hand on the judge's
shoulder most offensively; but in spite of this Kenton had the weakness
to ask him in, and to call Ellen to get him the most