take bitters for a month afterwards because she gave
the cookies to Abby Atkins.

Chapter XIII

In all growth there is emulation and striving for precedence between
the spiritual and the physical, and this very emulation may
determine the rate of progression of the whole. Sometimes the one,
sometimes the other, may be in advance, but all the time the
tendency is towards the distant goal. Sometimes the two keep
abreast, and then there is the greatest harmony in speed. In Ellen
Brewster at twelve and fifteen the spiritual outstripped the
physical, as is often the case. Her eyes grew intense and hollow
with reflection under knitting brows, her thin shoulders stooped
like those of a sage bent with study and contemplation. She was
slender to emaciation; her clothes hung loosely over her form, which
seemed as sexless as a lily-stem; indeed, her body seemed only made
for the head, which was flower-like and charming, but almost painful
in its delicacy, and with such weight of innocent pondering upon the
unknown conditions of things in which she found herself. At times,
of course, there were ebullitions of youthful spirit, and the child
was as inconsequent as a kitten. At those times she was neither
child nor woman; she was an anomalous thing made up not so much of
actualities as of instincts. She romped with her mates as unseen and
uncomprehended of herself as any young animal, but the flame of her
striving spirit made everything full of unread meaning.

Ellen was accounted a most remarkable scholar. She had left Miss
Mitchell's school, and was in one of a higher grade. At fifteen she
entered the high-school and had a master.

Andrew was growing old fast in those days, though not so old as to
years. Though he was far from old, his hair was gray, his back bent.
He moved with a weary shuffle. The men in the shop began to eye him
furtively. "Andrew Brewster will get fired next," they said. "The
boss 'ain't no use for men with the first snap gone." Indeed,
Andrew was constantly given jobs of lower grades, which did not pay
so well. Whenever the force was reduced on account of dulness in
trade, Andrew was one of the first to be laid aside on waiting
orders in the regular army of toil. On one of these occasions, in
the spring after Ellen was fifteen, his first fit of recklessness
seized him. One night, after loafing a week, he came home with fever
spots in his cheeks and a curiously bright, strained look in his
eyes. F