The Portion of Labor | Page 5

the child's agitation. "I don't care. If it wasn't for you, I
would leave him. I wouldn't live as I am doing. I would leave
everybody. I am tired of this awful life. Oh, if it wasn't for you, Ellen, I
would leave everybody and start fresh!"
"You can leave me whenever you want to," said Eva, her handsome
face burning red with wrath, and she went out of the room, which was
suffocating with the fumes of the burning wool, tossing her black head,
all banged and coiled in the latest fashion.
Of late years Fanny had sunk her personal vanity further and further in
that for her child. She brushed her own hair back hard from her temples,
and candidly revealed all her unyouthful lines, and dwelt fondly upon
the arrangement of little Ellen's locks, which were of a fine, pale yellow,
as clear as the color of amber.
She never recut her skirts or her sleeves, but she studied anxiously all
the slightest changes in children's fashions. After her sister had left the
room with a loud bang of the door, she sat for a moment gazing straight
ahead, her face working, then she burst into such a passion of hysterical
wailing as the child had never heard. Ellen, watching her mother with
eyes so frightened and full of horror that there was no room for childish
love and pity in them, grew very pale. She had left the door by which
she had entered open; she gazed one moment at her mother, then she
turned and slipped out of the room, and, opening the outer door softly,
though her mother would not have heard nor noticed, went out of the
house.

Then she ran as fast as she could down the frozen road, a little, dark
figure, passing as rapidly as the shadow of a cloud between the earth
and the full moon.

Chapter II
The greatest complexity in the world attends the motive-power of any
action. Infinite perspectives of mental mirrors reflect the whys of all
doing. An adult with long practice in analytic introspection soon
becomes bewildered when he strives to evolve the primary and
fundamental reasons for his deeds; a child so striving would be lost in
unexpected depths; but a child never strives. A child obeys
unquestioningly and absolutely its own spiritual impellings without a
backward glance at them.
Little Ellen Brewster ran down the road that November night, and did
not know then, and never knew afterwards, why she ran. Loving
renunciation was surging high in her childish heart, giving an
indication of tidal possibilities for the future, and there was also a bitter,
angry hurt of slighted dependency and affection. Had she not heard
them say, her own mother and father say, that they would be better off
and happier with her out of the way, and she their dearest loved and
most carefully cherished possession in the whole world? It is a cruel
fall for an apple of the eye to the ground, for its law of gravitation is of
the soul, and its fall shocks the infinite. Little Ellen felt herself sorely
hurt by her fall from such fair heights; she was pierced by the sharp
thorns of selfish interests which flourish below all the heavenward
windows of life.
Afterwards, when her mother and father tried to make her tell them
why she ran away, she could not say; the answer was beyond her own
power.
There was no snow on the ground, but the earth was frozen in great ribs
after a late thaw. Ellen ran painfully between the ridges which a long
line of ice-wagons had made with their heavy wheels earlier in the day.

When the spaces between the ridges were too narrow for her little feet,
she ran along the crests, and that was precarious. She fell once and
bruised one of her delicate knees, then she fell again, and struck the
knee on the same place. It hurt her, and she caught her breath with a
gasp of pain. She pulled up her little frock and touched her hand to her
knee, and felt it wet, then she whimpered on the lonely road, and,
curiously enough, there was pity for her mother as well as for herself in
her solitary grieving. "Mother would feel pretty bad if she knew how I
was hurt, enough to make it bleed," she murmured, between her soft
sobs. Ellen did not dare cry loudly, from a certain unvoiced fear which
she had of shocking the stillness of the night, and also from a delicate
sense of personal dignity, and a dislike of violent manifestations of
feeling which had strengthened with her growth in the midst of the
turbulent atmosphere of her home. Ellen had the softest childish voice,