in-doors in prospect. She stopped at the first bright shop window,
and suddenly the exultation of freedom was over the child. She
tasted the sweets of rebellion and disobedience. She had stood
before that window once before of an evening, and her aunt Eva had
been with her, and one of her young men friends had come up behind,
and they had gone on, the child dragging backward at her aunt's
hand. Now she could stand as long as she wished, and stare and
stare, and drink in everything which her childish imagination
craved, and that was much. The imagination of a child is often like
a voracious maw, seizing upon all that comes within reach, and
producing spiritual indigestions and assimilations almost endless in
their effects upon the growth. This window before which Ellen stood
was that of a market: a great expanse of plate-glass framing a crude
study in the clearest color tones. It takes a child or an artist to
see a picture without the intrusion of its second dimension of
sordid use and the gross reflection of humanity.

Ellen looked at the great shelf laid upon with flesh and vegetables
and fruits with the careless precision of a kaleidoscope, and did
not for one instant connect anything thereon with the ends of
physical appetite, though she had not had her supper. What had a
meal of beefsteak and potatoes and squash served on the little
white-laid table at home to do with those great golden globes which
made one end of the window like the remove from a mine, those
satin-smooth spheres, those cuts as of red and white marble? She had
eaten apples, but these were as the apples of the gods, lying in a
heap of opulence, with a precious light-spot like a ruby on every
outward side. The turnips affected her imagination like ivory
carvings: she did not recognize them for turnips at all. She never
afterwards believed them to be turnips; and as for cabbages, they