As Ellen pedaled over the brick streets between rows of maple trees, her delight faded slowly before the assaults of her common sense. In these skirmishes, wild hope and inspiration went down in defeat. There were too many obstacles ... poverty, prejudice, even her own sense of provinciality. Yet underneath a little voice kept saying, “You’ll do it ... you’ll do it.... Nothing can stop you. You’ll be able to get what you want if you want it hard enough.”
And by the time she turned into the block where the Tolliver family lived, clinging like grim death to a respectability which demanded a brave face turned toward the world, her mind began once more to work in its secret way, planning how it would be possible.
Miss Ogilvie’s timid, frightened offer of help she had quite forgotten. Miss Ogilvie was so old, so gentle, so ineffectual ... like her own caged canaries. Ellen’s mind had begun already to turn toward her cousin Lily. The glamorous Lily must know some way out.
3
It was Lily who still dominated her thoughts when she descended at last to find her mother setting the table for the family supper. This was an operation into which Mrs. Tolliver threw all the great energy and force of her character. It was impossible for her to do things easily; the placing of each fork involved as much precision, as much thoroughness and intensity as the building of a bridge or a skyscraper. It was the gesture of an ardent housekeeper burning incense before the Gods of Domesticity, the abandoned devotion of an artist striving for perfection.
For an instant Ellen stood in the doorway watching her mother as if somewhere in the recesses of her clever brain she considered this parent as she might consider a stranger, marking the woman’s strong face, her vigorous black hair, the rosiness of her healthy cheeks. Ellen, her mother said, had a disconcerting way of studying people, of prying into their lives, even of imagining things about them that could not possibly have been true. This was exactly what Ellen did as she waited in the doorway. She regarded silently the figure that stood before her, swathed in durable serge and ornamented with a gold chain and a tiny Swiss watch out of all proportion with the size and vigor of her body.
Then suddenly Mrs. Tolliver became aware of her daughter’s presence. She straightened her back and stood with the knives and forks poised in her hand beneath the glare of the ornate chandelier.
“Well,” she said. “You might speak when you come into a room.” Then after a slight pause, “You can finish the table. I’ve got to watch the pies.”
Listlessly the daughter took the silverware and absently she began laying it at the places to be occupied by her father, by Fergus, by Robert. There was no place for Gramp Tolliver. He ate in the solitude of his own room meals which were placed on the bottom step of the “back way” to be carried up by him in response to a loud knock on the door of his hermitage. For eight years he had eaten thus in exile.
“Ma,” began Ellen, “when does Lily arrive?”