Little Mrs. Bent was helping her tall daughter into the Commencement dress which she had made with her own unresting hands. Her fair hair curled about her forehead, her short upper lip made her look like a little girl, and her whole appearance was at once attractive and pathetic. Mrs. Scott, whose inquisitive spirit made her wish to know every one in Waltonville by sight and as much about each person as she could discover, said of Mrs. Bent that she looked and acted like a lady, though she was none. Thomasina Davis, whose kindly spirit made her judge her acquaintances with sympathy, said that she believed that Mrs. Bent was a good woman who had suffered cruelly. Thomasina remembered her perfectly as Margie Ginter, the daughter of the most unpleasant, sodden, law-breaking tavern-keeper Waltonville had ever had, but did not think evil of her on that account. She knew that Margie had been light as thistledown, too easily pleased, too careless of the company she kept, entirely too free with her smiles, and a source of anxiety to the mothers of the young men of the town and to those who had the well-being of the college boys at heart; but she did not believe any of the serious accusations made against her by the older women; had not believed them when they were made and did not believe them now that they were occasionally recalled.
Margie had left Waltonville long ago with her father for another tavern in another State, and after a few years had returned with a married name and with a little girl whom she called "Nellie," and with means for very simple living. Whether her income had its source in the ill-gotten gains of her father or in the property of a deceased husband, or in some other less creditable source, Waltonville did not know. A few persons speculated about her when she returned, but she and her little daughter were soon accepted and ignored.
If there had been any one to compare Margie Ginter with Mrs. Bent, he would scarcely have believed her to be the same person. Margie Ginter had lived indifferently in a miserable tavern; Mrs. Bent conducted her little house with the most exquisite tidiness, and maintained therein the most perfect order. Her linens were less elegant than Mrs. Lister's, but they were no less beautifully laundered, no less elaborately marked. Margie had longed for constant company, and a succession of the most idle of pleasures; Mrs. Bent shrank even from the back-door calls of her neighbors. Margie had been confident, assured in all her motions, and almost impertinent in her glances at those whose disapproval she surmised; Mrs. Bent was humble, even frightened. Margie had never gone to church, but Mrs. Bent took a little side pew in the college church and sat there at each service. To Margie had come some mighty metamorphosis, changing her instincts, changing her very soul, as completely as a human body could have changed its position at a "Right-about face." The process had not been easy; it had written pathetic lines in the countenance which had once expressed only light-heartedness.
The tall daughter whom she was helping into her embroidered Commencement dress was as dark as her mother was fair and as direct of gaze as her mother was timid. Her gray eyes were singularly clear and bright; they held the glance so that her other features, beautiful as they were, became unimportant. Her other features, except her nose and her upper lip, were like her mother's; she had evidently a maternal inheritance, permeated and strengthened by a different strain.
She had not inherited, it was clear, from little Mrs. Bent the good mind which put her at the head of her class in college. Mrs. Bent was not a dull person, and she had certainly strength of will, but she had no aptitude for books even though she sat from time to time with one of Eleanor's volumes in her hand and listened for hours together while Eleanor read to her. Sometimes when her daughter was not about she looked in a puzzled, frightened way over what Eleanor had been reading, and she kept an old grammar hidden under a pile of neatly folded clothes in her bureau drawer.
Poor little Mrs. Bent made a brave effort to follow her swan in her flight. She had not, however, risen far, even in her effort to speak as others spoke. Her mistakes were those of a low stratum. Falling from her pretty lips in her youth and heard by uncritical ears, they had not seemed so dreadful. Now they were shocking. In her anxiety to do well, she sometimes formed new words upon the analogy of those which she knew.
"I thicken it with cream and I thinnen it with vinegar," she would say sweetly.
Sometimes a sudden "them there," long pruned from Eleanor's speech, slipped from her mother's tongue. "Them there" Mrs. Bent knew was execrable and was tortured by that knowledge.
Eleanor was now almost twenty years old, and seldom do twenty years flow with such smooth current. She could not remember when she had come to Waltonville to live, and she could recall distinctly only one incident in her life before she started to the village school. Children, in families where the past is frequently referred to, recall, or imagine that they recall, many incidents, but to Eleanor nothing was recalled.
The single incident which she remembered was impressed upon her by terror. Her mother and she were walking together upon a shady street when a man stopped them and spoke to them. "So you've come back, Margie!" was all that Eleanor could remember but the words remained in her mind. The man had laid his hand on her mother's arm, and Mrs. Bent had jerked away and had hurried down the street. Eleanor had seen the man a hundred times since, a heavy, dissipated creature named Bates who sat all day on the porch of the hotel.