he did not distinguish among his children. He
said that he did not suppose they were the best children in the world,
but they suited him; and he would not have known how to change them
for the better. He saw no harm in the behavior of Lottie when it most
shocked her brother; he liked her to have a good time; but it flattered
his nerves to have Ellen about him. Lottie was a great deal more
accomplished, he allowed that; she could play and sing, and she had
social gifts far beyond her sister; but he easily proved to his wife
that Nelly knew ten times as much.
Nelly read a great deal; she kept up with all the magazines, and knew
all the books in his library. He believed that she was a fine German
scholar, and in fact she had taken up that language after leaving
school, when, if she had been better advised than she could have been in
Tuskingum, she would have kept on with her French. She started the first
book club in the place; and she helped her father do the intellectual
honors of the house to the Eastern lecturers, who always stayed with
the judge when they came to Tuskingum. She was faithfully present at the
moments, which her sister shunned in derision, when her father explained
to them respectively his theory of regimental history, and would just,
as he said, show them a few of the documents he had collected. He
made Ellen show them; she knew where to put her hand on the most
characteristic and illustrative; and Lottie offered to bet what one
dared that Ellen would marry some of those lecturers yet; she was
literary enough.
She boasted that she was not literary herself, and had no use for any
one who was; and it could not have been her culture that drew the
most cultivated young man in Tuskingum to her. Ellen was really more
beautiful; Lottie was merely very pretty; but she had charm for them,
and Ellen, who had their honor and friendship, had no charm for them. No
one seemed drawn to her as they were drawn to her sister till a man came
who was not one of the most cultivated in Tuskingum; and then it was
doubtful whether she was not first drawn to him. She was too transparent
to hide her feeling from her father and mother, who saw with even more
grief than shame that she could not hide it from the man himself, whom
they thought so unworthy of it.
He had suddenly arrived in Tuskingum from one of the villages of the
county, where he had been teaching school, and had found something to do
as reporter on the Tuskin
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