live with her married sister. She spoke openly to Fanny concerning
her opinion of another woman's coming to live on poor Andrew, and
paid no heed to the assertions that Eva would work and pay her way.

Mrs. Zelotes, although she acknowledged it no social degradation for
a man to work in a shoe-factory, regarded a woman who worked therein
as having hopelessly forfeited her caste. Eva Loud had worked in a
shop ever since she was fourteen, and had tagged the grimy and
leathery procession of Louds, who worked in shoe-factories when they
worked at all, in a short skirt with her hair in a strong black
pigtail. There was a kind of bold grace and showy beauty about this
Eva Loud which added to Mrs. Zelotes's scorn and dislike.

"She walks off to work in the shop as proud as if she was going to a
party," she said, and she fairly trembled with anger when she saw
the girl set out with her son in the morning. She would have
considered it much more according to the eternal fitness of things
had her son Andrew been attending a queen whom he would have dropped
at her palace on the way. She writhed inwardly whenever little Ellen
spoke of her aunt Eva, and would have forbidden her to do so had she
dared.

"To think of that child associating with a shop-girl!" she said to
Mrs. Pointdexter. Mrs. Pointdexter was her particular friend, whom
she regarded with loving tolerance of superiority, though she had
been the daughter of a former clergyman of the town, and had wedded
another, and might presumably have been accounted herself of a
somewhat higher estate. The gentle and dependent clergyman's widow,
when she came back to her native city after the death of her
husband, found herself all at once in a pleasant little valley of