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and slump of outline, this insistency of repellent curves, and then
the old woman spoke and thrust out a great, soft hand, and the heart
of the child overleaped her artistic sense and her reason, and she
thought old Mrs. Mitchell beautiful. Mrs. Mitchell never failed to
regale her with a superior sort of cooky, and often with a covert
peppermint, and that although the Mitchells were not well off. The
old place was mortgaged, and Miss Mitchell had hard work to pay the
interest. Ellen had the vaguest ideas about the mortgage, and was
half inclined to think it might be a disfiguring patch in the
plastering of the sitting-room, which hung down in an unsightly
fashion with a disclosure of hairy edges, and threatened danger to
the heads underneath.

Often of a Saturday afternoon Ellen went to visit Miss Mitchell and
her mother, and really preferred them to friends of her own age.
Miss Mitchell had a store of superannuated paper dolls which dated
from her own childhood. Their quaint costumes, and old-fashioned
coiffures, and simpers were of overwhelming interest to Ellen. Even
at that early age she had a perception of the advantages of an
atmosphere to art, and even to the affections. Without understanding
it, she loved those obsolete paper-dolls and those women of former
generations better because they gave her breathing-scope for her
imagination. She could love Abby Atkins and Floretta Vining at one
bite, as it were, and that was the end of it, but she could sit and
ponder and dream over Miss Mitchell and her mother, and see whole
vistas of them in receding mirrors of affection.

As for the teacher and her mother, they simply adored the child--as
indeed everybody did. She continued at her first school for a year,
which was one of the hardest financially ever experienced in Rowe.
Norman Lloyd during all that time did not reopen his factory, and in
the autumn two others shut down. The streets were full of the
discontented ranks of impotent labor, and all the public buildings
were props for the weary shoulders of the unemployed. On pleasant
days the sunny sides of the vacant factories, especially, furnished
settings for lines of scowling faces of misery.

This atmosphere affected Ellen more than any one realized, since the
personal bearing of it was kept from her. She did not know that her
father was drawing upon his precious savings for daily needs, she
did not know how her aunt Eva and her uncle Jim were getting into
g