Ellen's father always picked out for her the choicest and tenderest
bits of the humble dishes, and his keen eyes were more watchful of
her plate than of his own. Always after Ellen's mother had said to
her father that she thought Ellen looked pindling he was late about
coming home from the shop, and would turn in at the gate laden
with paper parcels. Then Ellen would find an orange or some other
delicacy beside her plate at supper. Ellen's aunt Eva, her mother's
younger sister, who lived with them, would look askance at the
tidbit with open sarcasm. "You jest spoil that young one, Fanny,"
she would say to her sister.

"You can do jest as you are a mind to with your own young ones when
you get them, but you can let mine alone. It's none of your business
what her father and me give her to eat; you don't buy it," Ellen's
mother would retort. There was the utmost frankness of speech
between the two sisters. Neither could have been in the slightest
doubt as to what the other thought of her, for it was openly
proclaimed to her a dozen times a day, and the conclusion was never
complimentary. Ellen learned very early to form her own opinions of
character from her own intuition, otherwise she would have held her
aunt and mother in somewhat slighting estimation, and she loved
them both dearly. They were headstrong, violent-tempered women, but
she had an instinct for the staple qualities below that surface
turbulence, which was lashed higher by every gust of opposition.
These two loud, contending voices, which filled the house before
and after shop-hours--for Eva worked in the shop with her
brother-in-law--with a duet of discords instead of harmonies, meant
no more to Ellen than the wrangle of the robins in the cherry-trees.
She supposed that two sisters always conversed in that way. She
never knew why her father, after a fiery but ineffectual attempt to