tle 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 fairly trembled with anger when she saw
the girl set out with her son in the morning. She would have
considered it much more according to the eternal fitness of things
had her son Andrew been attending a queen whom he would have dropped
at her palace on the way. She writhed inwardly whenever little Ellen
spoke of her aunt Eva, and would have forbidden her to do so had she
dared.

"To think of that child associating with a shop-girl!" she said to
Mrs. Pointdexter. Mrs. Pointdexter was her particular f