The Portion of Labor | Page 2

jest spoil that young one, Fanny," she would say to her sister.
"You can do jest as you are a mind to with your own young ones when
you get them, but you can let mine alone. It's none of your business
what her father and me give her to eat; you don't buy it," Ellen's mother
would retort. There was the utmost frankness of speech between the
two sisters. Neither could have been in the slightest doubt as to what
the other thought of her, for it was openly proclaimed to her a dozen
times a day, and the conclusion was never complimentary. Ellen
learned very early to form her own opinions of character from her own
intuition, otherwise she would have held her aunt and mother in
somewhat slighting estimation, and she loved them both dearly. They
were headstrong, violent-tempered women, but she had an instinct for
the staple qualities below that surface turbulence, which was lashed
higher by every gust of opposition. These two loud, contending voices,
which filled the house before and after shop-hours--for Eva worked in
the shop with her brother-in-law--with a duet of discords instead of
harmonies, meant no more to Ellen than the wrangle of the robins in the
cherry-trees. She supposed that two sisters always conversed in that
way. She never knew why her father, after a fiery but ineffectual
attempt to quell the feminine tumult, would send her across the east
yard to her grandmother Brewster's, and seat himself on the east
door-step in summer, or go down to the store in the winter. She would
sit at the window in her grandmother's sitting-room, eating peacefully
the slice of pound-cake or cooky with which she was always regaled,
and listen to the scolding voices across the yard as she might have
listened to any outside disturbance. She was never sucked into the
whirlpool of wrath which seemed to gyrate perpetually in her home,
and wondered at her grandmother Brewster's impatient exclamations

concerning the poor child, and her poor boy, and that it was a shame
and a disgrace, when now and then a louder explosion of wrath struck
her ears.
Ellen's grandmother--Mrs. Zelotes Brewster, as she was called, though
her husband Zelotes had been dead for many years--was an aristocrat
by virtue of inborn prejudices and convictions, in despite of
circumstances. The neighbors said that Mrs. Zelotes Brewster had
always been high-feeling, and had held up her head with the best. It
would have been nearer the truth to say that she held up her head above
the best. No one seeing the erect old woman, in her draperies of the
finest black goods to be bought in the city, could estimate in what
heights of thin upper air of spiritual consequence her head was elevated.
She had always a clear sight of the head-tops of any throng in which
she found herself, and queens or duchesses would have been no
exception. She would never have failed to find some stool of superior
possessions or traits upon which to raise herself, and look down upon
crown and coronet. When she read in the papers about the marriage of a
New York belle to an English duke, she reflected that the duke could be
by no means as fine a figure of a man as Zelotes had been, and as her
son Andrew was, although both her husband and son had got all their
education in the town schools, and had worked in shoe-shops all their
lives. She could have looked at a palace or a castle, and have remained
true to the splendors of her little one-story-and-a-half house with a best
parlor and sitting-room, and a shed kitchen for use in hot weather.
She would not for one instant have been swerved from utmost
admiration and faith in her set of white-and-gold wedding china by the
contemplation of Copeland and Royal Svres. She would have pitted her
hair-cloth furniture of the ugliest period of household art against all the
Chippendales and First Empire pieces in existence.
As Mrs. Zelotes had never seen any household possessions to equal her
own, let alone to surpass them, she was of the same mind with regard to
her husband and his family, herself and her family, her son and little
granddaughter. She never saw any gowns and shawls which compared
with hers in fineness and richness; she never tasted a morsel of cookery

which was not as sawdust when she reflected upon her own; and all that
humiliated her in the least, or caused her to feel in the least dissatisfied,
was her son's wife and her family and antecedents.
Mrs. Zelotes Brewster had considered that her son Andrew was
marrying immeasurably beneath him when he married Fanny Loud, of
Loudville. Loudville was a humble, an almost