quell the feminine tumult, would send her across the east yard to
her grandmother Brewster's, and seat himself on the east door-step
in summer, or go down to the store in the winter. She would sit at
the window in her grandmother's sitting-room, eating peacefully the
slice of pound-cake or cooky with which she was always regaled, and
listen to the scolding voices across the yard as she might have
listened to any outside disturbance. She was never sucked into the
whirlpool of wrath which seemed to gyrate perpetually in her home,
and wondered at her grandmother Brewster's impatient exclamations
concerning the poor child, and her poor boy, and that it was a shame
and a disgrace, when now and then a louder explosion of wrath struck
her ears.

Ellen's grandmother--Mrs. Zelotes Brewster, as she was called,
though her husband Zelotes had been dead for many years--was an
aristocrat by virtue of inborn prejudices and convictions, in
despite of circumstances. The neighbors said that Mrs. Zelotes
Brewster had always been high-feeling, and had held up her head with
the best. It would have been nearer the truth to say that she held
up her head above the best. No one seeing the erect old woman, in
her draperies of the finest black goods to be bought in the city,
could estimate in what heights of thin upper air of spiritual
consequence her head was elevated. She had always a clear sight of
the head-tops of any throng in which she found herself, and queens
or duchesses would have been no exception. She would never have
failed to find some stool of superior possessions or traits upon
which to raise herself, and look down upon crown and coronet. When
she read in the papers about the marriage of a New York belle to an
English duke, she reflected that the duke could be by no means as
fine a figure of a man as Zelotes had been, and as her son Andrew