raise that white-ribboned roll
and read, or else be disgraced forever, and yet she was powerless.
But suddenly some compelling glance seemed to arouse her from this
lock of nerve and muscle; she raised her eyes, and Cynthia Lennox,
on the farther side of the hall, was gazing full at her with an
indescribable gaze of passion and help and command. Her own mother's
look could not have influenced her. Ellen raised her valedictory,
bowed, and began to read. Andrew looked so pale that people nudged
one another to look at him. Mrs. Zelotes settled back, relaxing
stiffly from her fierce attitude. Fanny wiped her forehead with a
cheap lace-bordered handkerchief. There was a stifled sob farther
back, that came from Eva Tenny, who sat back on account of a break
across the shoulders in the back of her silk dress. Amabel, anaemic
and eager in a little, tawdry, cheap muslin frock, sat beside her,
with worshipful eyes on Ellen. "What ailed her?" she whispered,
hitting her mother with a sharp little elbow. "Hush up!" whispered
Eva, angrily, surreptitiously wiping her eyes. In front, directly in
her line of vision, sat the woman of whom she was jealous--the young
widow, who had been Aggie Bemis, arrayed in a handsome India silk
and a flower-laden hat. Eva's hat was trimmed with a draggled
feather and a bunch of roses which she had tried to color with
aniline dye. When she got home that night she tore the feather out
of the hat and flung it across the room. She wished to do it that
afternoon every time she looked at the other woman's roses against
the smooth knot of her brown hair, and that repressed impulse, with
her alarm at Ellen's silence, had made her almost hysterical. When
Ellen's clear young voice rose and filled the hall she calmed
herself. Ellen had not folded back her first page with a flutter of
the white satin ribbons before people began to sit straight and
stare at each other incredulously. The subject of the valedictory,
as well as those of the other essays, had been allotted, and Ellen's
had been "Equality," and she had written a most revolutionary
valedictory. Ellen had written with a sort of poetic fire, and,
crude as it all was, she might have had the inspiration of a Shelley
or a Chatterton as she stood there, raising her fearless young front
over the marshalling of her sentiments on the smooth sheets of
foolscap. Her voice, once started, rang out clear and full. She had
hesitated at nothing, she flung all castes int