Ellen laughed, but through the sound of her soft mirth there ran, like a taut singing wire, the echo of subdued bitterness. “No. At least nothing very definite.... She said that when I came to Paris to study I could live with her. We didn’t get beyond that.”
“But you don’t want to go to Paris.... It’s a wicked city.... I thought you’d given all that up long ago.”
But Ellen only lifted the flame colored gown and said, “Look at it. Feel it. Isn’t it beautiful?” And she ran her hand over the soft brocade with a sensuous air that was new and alarming. “There’s nothing like it in all the Town.”
Dumbly the mother fingered the stuff; she felt of it tenderly, reverently, and after a long time she said, “But you couldn’t wear such clothes here. Nobody has ever seen anything like them ... except on Lily, and she’s different. That’s why people talk about her. No, you couldn’t wear them here. People would laugh at you.”
For an answer Ellen only held up the green gown and then the black one. They were simply made and not dissimilar, the flame colored one girdled by a chain of glittering rhinestones, the others by cords of silver. They were so scant there seemed to be nothing to them, so simply made that their lack of ornament conveyed to Hattie Tolliver a sense of nakedness. People in the Town wore bows, rosebuds, festoons of lace—all save Lily.
“I don’t see what Lily was thinking of,” she observed presently. And she drew in her lower lip doubtfully with an air of meditation as if the gowns raised before her eyes a wild vista of foreign orgies.
“Yes, people would laugh at me,” said Ellen, “not that it makes any difference.”
And placing the gowns over her arm, she turned away and started up the stairs to her own room. Her mother, staring after her, made a clucking sound which was her invariable signal of alarm. She must have speculated upon what passed between Ellen and her mysterious cousin within the depths of the gloomy house among the Mills; but she said nothing. In such a mood, it was impossible to learn anything from the girl.
And as she turned at last to resume her duties in the kitchen, the shadow of a moth-eaten coonskin coat and beaver hat passed the window. It was the ominous shadow of Gramp Tolliver hungrily returning for his noon meal. Clearly there was calamity in the air. He had never been so active before....
Ellen had a way of dealing with the truth which must have alarmed her mother. It was not that she lied; rather it was that by some selective process she withheld certain truths and brought forward others so that the resulting effect was one of distortion, complicated by the wildest variation of mood. At the moment the girl appeared to be elated, perhaps only by the possession of the three naked gowns—so elated that her high spirits carried into the afternoon when she announced her intention of going skating.