The Portion of Labor | Page 8

red and white marble? She had eaten apples, but these were as the
apples of the gods, lying in a heap of opulence, with a precious
light-spot like a ruby on every outward side. The turnips affected her
imagination like ivory carvings: she did not recognize them for turnips
at all. She never afterwards believed them to be turnips; and as for
cabbages, they were green inflorescences of majestic bloom. There is
one position from which all common things can be seen with
reflections of preciousness, and Ellen had insensibly taken it. The
window and the shop behind were illuminated with the yellow glare of
gas, but the glass was filmed here and there with frost, which tempered
it as with a veil. In the background rosy-faced men in white frocks were
moving to and fro, customers were passing in and out, but they were all
glorified to the child. She did not see them as butchers, and as men and
women selling and buying dinners.
However, all at once everything was spoiled, for her fairy castle of
illusion or a higher reality was demolished, and that not by any blow of
practicality, but by pity and sentiment. Ellen was a woman-child, and
suddenly she struck the rock upon which women so often wreck or
effect harbor, whichever it may be. All at once she looked up from the
dazzling mosaic of the window and saw the dead partridges and grouse
hanging in their rumpled brown mottle of plumage, and the dead
rabbits, long and stark, with their fur pointed with frost, hanging in a
piteous headlong company, and all her delight and wonder vanished,
and she came down to the hard actualities of things. "Oh, the poor
birds!" she cried out in her heart. "Oh, the poor birds, and the poor
bunnies!"
Just at that moment, when the sudden rush of compassion and
indignation had swollen her heart to the size of a woman's, and given it
the aches of one, when her eyes were so dilated with the sight of

helpless injury and death that they reflected the mystery of it and lost
the outlook of childhood, when her pretty baby mouth was curved like
an inverted bow of love with the impulse of tears, Cynthia Lennox
came up the street and stopped short when she reached her.
Suddenly Ellen felt some one pressing close to her, and, looking up,
saw a woman, only middle-aged, but whom she thought very old,
because her hair was white, standing looking at her very keenly with
clear, light-blue eyes under a high, pale forehead, from which the gray
hair was combed uncompromisingly back. The woman had been a
beauty once, of a delicate, nervous type, and had a certain beauty now,
a something which had endured like the fineness of texture of a web
when its glow of color has faded. Her black garments draped her with
sober richness, and there was a gleam of dark fur when the wind caught
her cloak. A small tuft of ostrich plumes nodded from her bonnet. Ellen
smelt flowers vaguely, and looked at the lady's hand, but she did not
carry any.
"Whose little girl are you?" Cynthia Lennox asked, softly, and Ellen
did not answer. "Can't you tell me whose little girl you are?" Cynthia
Lennox asked again. Ellen did not speak, but there was the swift flicker
of a thought over her face which told her name as plainly as language if
the woman had possessed the skill to interpret it.
"Ellen Brewster--Ellen Brewster is my name," Ellen said to herself very
hard, and that was how she endured the reproach of her own silence.
The woman looked at her with surprise and admiration that were fairly
passionate. Ellen was a beautiful child, with a face like a white flower.
People had always turned to look after her, she was so charming, and
had caused her mothers heart to swell with pride. "The way everybody
we met has stared after that child to-day!" she would whisper her
husband when she brought Ellen home from some little expedition;
then the two would look at the little one's face with the one holy vanity
of the world. Ellen wore to-night the little white shawl which her father
had caught up when he carried her over to her grandmother's. She held
it tightly together under her chin with one tiny hand, and her face
looked out from between the soft folds with the absolute purity of curve

and color of a pearl.
"Oh, you darling!" said the woman, suddenly; "you darling!" and Ellen
shrank away from her. "Don't be afraid, dear," said Cynthia Lennox.
"Don't be afraid, only tell me who you are. What is your name, dear?"
But Ellen remained silent; only, as she shrank aloof,