accomplished, he allowed that; she could play and sing, and she had
social gifts far beyond her sister; but he easily proved to his wife that
Nelly knew ten times as much.

Nelly read a great deal; she kept up with all the magazines, and knew all
the books in his library. He believed that she was a fine German
scholar, and in fact she had taken up that language after leaving school,
when, if she had been better advised than she could have been in
Tuskingum, she would have kept on with her French. She started the first
book club in the place; and she helped her father do the intellectual
honors of the house to the Eastern lecturers, who always stayed with the
judge when they came to Tuskingum. She was faithfully present at the
moments, which her sister shunned in derision, when her father explained
to them respectively his theory of regimental history, and would just,
as he said, show them a few of the documents he had collected. He made
Ellen show them; she knew where to put her hand on the most
characteristic and illustrative; and Lottie offered to bet what one dared
that Ellen would marry some of those lecturers yet; she was literary
enough.

She boasted that she was not literary herself, and had no use for any one
who was; and it could not have been her culture that drew the most
cultivated young man in Tuskingum to her. Ellen was really more
beautiful; Lottie was merely very pretty; but she had charm for them, and
Ellen, who had their honor and friendship, had no charm for them. No one
seemed drawn to her as they were drawn to her sister till a man came who
was not one of the most cultivated in Tuskingum; and then it was doubtful
whether she was not first drawn to him. She was too transparent to hide
her feeling from her father and mother, who saw with even more grief than
shame that she could not hide it from the man himself, whom they thought