Mrs. Bent shivered. "Yes, we were away from here once. Don't think of that man, and don't ever speak to him. If he comes toward you, you run, Nellie." Then Mrs. Bent took the little girl roughly by the arm. "Children should be seen and not heard—remember that!"
From Eleanor's first year in school a few vivid experiences remained. Racing home, she had fallen and had cut her head and several stitches had to be put in under her thick hair. A neighbor, running for the old doctor, had returned with the newcomer, Dr. Green, who had dismissed the spectators and had hurt her terribly. Then he had carried her to bed, where she slept for a long time and waked with a burning pain in her head, the first pain she had ever had.
When he came the next day, she was better and he had sat by her bed for a long time, asking her question after question about her lessons. He spoke in a stern, fierce tone, as though nothing about her education or about the world pleased him. He corrected savagely her inherited errors in speech as though he could re-make her language in a morning. Her eyes closed in the middle of a sentence, and when she woke he was no longer in the room. But it seemed to her that a voice was still about, going on and on and on. Another excited voice made answer after a long time, "I ain't a-goin' to do it!" If it was Dr. Green's voice and if it was to Mrs. Bent that he was speaking, their knowledge of one another had advanced far beyond the stage of casual acquaintance. Their dialogue was not a conversation, but a quarrel.
The next day, when Eleanor sat up against the pillows, Dr. Green brought her a book. He had written "Eleanor" on the fly-leaf.
"Nellie is a nonsensical name," he declared. "It must be changed."
Eleanor looked at her mother.
"I don't care," said Mrs. Bent. If Eleanor had been dragged from the grave instead of suffering a small scalp wound, she could have been no more terrified. Her face was tear-stained, her color was gone, and one hand closed and opened constantly upon the other. In her eyes shone not only anguish, but a fierce anger. She seemed to take little pleasure in this friend of her youth.
The picture book was the first of a long series of books which appeared in the little house. First came story-books, wonder-tales, fairy-tales, "Robinson Crusoe," "Swiss Family Robinson," then a set of Scott, then poetry. Presently a bookcase had to be bought, then another.
She was allowed to go henceforth to Dr. Green's untidy office, or, at least, her mother did not reprove her when she came late from school because Dr. Green had called to her to stop, or to climb into his buggy and go with him into the country. She had ceased to be afraid of him; once or twice she ventured a shy touch of hand. There was a need in little Eleanor's soul which he supplied, a precocious intellectual curiosity which was now wakening. Presently she began to ask questions and Dr. Green answered them. Curt and positive as he was with others, he never was curt with her. He sometimes examined her to see what she had retained, and smiled to himself over the success of his teachings. Eleanor had gained all unconsciously a knowledge far superior to that of Cora Scott or even to that of Richard Lister. Neither Dr. Scott nor Dr. Lister talked to their offspring about world politics, about the literature of their own country and all others, about the trees by the wayside and the stars in the heavens as Dr. Green talked to little Eleanor Bent. It was when she repeated at home, as nearly as she could in his language, all his wisdom, that Mrs. Bent took to studying her grammar in the evenings, after Eleanor had gone to bed, and hiding it under her pillow.