mself. What was he doing there, then? The judge asked himself
that, without being able to answer himself. So far as he could make
out, his wife and he were letting him see Ellen, and show her off to
his mother, mainly to disgust her with them both, and because they were
afraid that if they denied her to him, it would be the worse for them
through her suffering. The judge was not accustomed to apply the tests
by which people are found vulgar or not; these were not of his simple
world; all that he felt about Mrs. Bittridge was that she was a very
foolish, false person, who was true in nothing but her admiration of her
rascal of a son; he did not think of Bittridge as a rascal violently,
but helplessly, and with a heart that melted in pity for Ellen.

He longed to have these people gone, not so much because he was so
unhappy in their presence as because he wished to learn Ellen's feeling
about them from his wife. She would know, whether Allen said anything
to her or not. But perhaps if Mrs. Kenton had been asked to deliver her
mind on this point at once she would have been a little puled. All that
she could see, and she saw it with a sinking of the heart, was that
Ellen looked more at peace than she had been since Bittridge was last
in their house at Tuskingum. Her eyes covertly followed him as he sat
talking, or went about the room, making himself at home among them, as
if he were welcome with every one. He joked her more than the rest, and
accused her of having become a regular New-Yorker; he said he supposed
that when she came back from Europe she would not know anybody in
Tuskingum; and his mother, playing with Ellen's fingers, as if they had
been the fringe of a tassel, declared that she must not mind him, for he
carried on just so with everybody; at the same time she ordered him to
stop, or she would go right out of the room.

She gave no other sign of going, and it was her son who had to make the
movement for her at last; she apparently did not know that it was her
part to make it. She said that now the Kentons must come and return her
call, and be real neighborly, just the same as if they were all at home
together. When her son shook hands with every one she did so too, and
she said to each, "Well, I wish you good-morning," and let him push her
before him, in high delight with the joke, out of the room.

When they were gone the Kentons sat silent, Ellen with a rapt smile on
her thin, flushed face, till Lottie said