The Portion of Labor | Page 3

disreputably humble,
suburb of the little provincial city. The Louds from whom the locality
took its name were never held in much repute, being considered of a
stratum decidedly below the ordinary social one of the city. When
Andrew told his mother that he was to marry a Loud, she declared that
she would not go to his wedding, nor receive the girl at her house, and
she kept her word. When one day Andrew brought his sweetheart to his
home to call, trusting to her pretty face and graceful though rather sharp
manner to win his mother's heart, he found her intrenched in the
kitchen, and absolutely indifferent to the charms of his Fanny in her
stylish, albeit somewhat tawdry, finery, though she had peeped to good
purpose from her parlor window, which commanded the road, before
she fled kitchenward.
Mrs. Zelotes was beating eggs with as firm an impetus as if she were
heaving up earth-works to strengthen her own pride when her son thrust
his timid face into the kitchen. "Mother, Fanny's in the parlor," he said,
beseechingly.
"Let her set there, then, if she wants to," said his mother, and that was
all she would say.
Very soon Fanny went home on her lover's arm, freeing her mind with
no uncertain voice on the way, though she was on the public road, and
within hearing of sharp ears in open windows. Fanny had a pride as
fierce as Mrs. Zelotes Brewster's, though it was not so well sustained,
and she would then and there have refused to marry Andrew had she
not loved him with all her passionate and ill-regulated heart. But she
never forgave her mother-in-law for the slight she had put upon her that
day, and the slights which she put upon her later. She would have
refused to live next door to Mrs. Zelotes had not Andrew owned the
land and been in a measure forced to build there. Every time she had

flaunted out of her new house-door in her wedding finery she had an
uncomfortable feeling of defiance under a fire of hostile eyes in the
next house. She kept her own windows upon that side as clear and
bright as diamonds, and her curtains in the stiffest, snowy slants, lest
her terrible mother-in-law should have occasion to impeach her
housekeeping, she being a notable housewife. The habits of the Louds
of Loudville were considered shiftless in the extreme, and poor Fanny
had heard an insinuation of Mrs. Zelotes to that effect.
The elder Mrs. Brewster's knowledge of her son's house and his wife
was limited to the view from her west windows, but there was
half-truce when little Ellen was born. Mrs. Brewster, who considered
that no woman could be obtained with such a fine knowledge of
nursing as she possessed, and who had, moreover, a regard for her poor
boy's pocket-book, appeared for the first time in his doorway, and
opened her heart to her son's child, if not to his wife, whom she began
to tolerate.
However, the two women had almost a hand-to-hand encounter over
little Ellen's cradle, the elder Mrs. Brewster judging that it was for her
good to be rocked to sleep, the younger not. Little Ellen herself,
however, turned the balance that time in favor of her grandmother,
since she cried every time the gentle, swaying motion was hushed, and
absolutely refused to go to sleep, and her mother from the first held
every course which seemed to contribute to her pleasure and comfort as
a sacred duty. At last it came to pass that the two women met only upon
that small neutral ground of love, and upon all other territory were
sworn foes. Especially was Mrs. Zelotes wroth when Eva Loud, after
the death of her father, one of the most worthless and shiftless of the
Louds of Loudville, came to live with her married sister. She spoke
openly to Fanny concerning her opinion of another woman's coming to
live on poor Andrew, and paid no heed to the assertions that Eva would
work and pay her way.
Mrs. Zelotes, although she acknowledged it no social degradation for a
man to work in a shoe-factory, regarded a woman who worked therein
as having hopelessly forfeited her caste. Eva Loud had worked in a

shop ever since she was fourteen, and had tagged the grimy and
leathery procession of Louds, who worked in shoe-factories when they
worked at all, in a short skirt with her hair in a strong black pigtail.
There was a kind of bold grace and showy beauty about this Eva Loud
which added to Mrs. Zelotes's scorn and dislike.
"She walks off to work in the shop as proud as if she was going to a
party," she said, and she