But the next morning the reduced price-list was posted on the walls of the different rooms in Lloyd's.
Chapter XLVII
There was a driving snow-storm the next day. When Ellen started for the factory the white twilight of early morning still lingered. Everywhere were the sons and daughters of toil plodding laboriously and noiselessly through the snow, each keeping in the track of the one who went before. There was no wind blowing, and the snow was in a blue-white level; the trees bent stiffly and quietly beneath a heavy shag of white, and now and then came a clamor of birds, which served to accentuate the silence and peace. Ellen could always be forced by an extreme phase of nature to forgetfulness of her own stresses. For the time being she forgot everything; her vain watching for Robert, the talk of trouble in the factory, the disappointment in her home—all were forgotten in the contemplation, or rather in the absorbing, of this new-old wonder of snow.
There was a survival of the old Greek spirit in the girl, and had she come to earth without her background of orthodox traditions, she might have easily found her own deities in nature. The peace of the snow enveloped her soul as well as the earth, and she became a beneficiary of the white storm; the graceful droop of the pine boughs extended to her thoughts, and the clamor of the birds aroused in her a winged freedom, so that she felt at once peace and a sort of ecstasy. She walked in the track of a stolidly plodding man before her, as different a person as if she were an inhabitant of another planet. He was digesting the soggy, sweet griddle-cakes which he had eaten for breakfast, and revolving in his mind two errands for his wife—one, a pail of lard; the other, three yards of black dress braid; he was considering the surface scum of existence, that which pertained solely to his own petty share of it; the girl, the clear residue of life which was, and had been, and would be. Each was on the way to humble labor for daily bread, but with a difference of eternity between them.
But when Ellen reached the end of the cross street where the Atkins girls lived, she heard a sound which dispelled her rapt state. Her far vision became a near one; she saw, as it were, the clouded window-glass between her mortal eyes and the beyond, and the sound of a cough brought it about. Abby and Maria were coming towards her through the snow. Maria was coughing violently, and Abby was scolding her.
“I don't care anything about it, Maria Atkins,” Abby was saying, “you ought to be ashamed of yourself coming out such a morning as this. There isn't any sense in it. You know you'll catch cold, and then there'll be two of you to take care of. You don't help a mite doing so, you needn't think you do.”
When Abby caught sight of Ellen she hastened forward, while Maria, still coughing, trailed behind, lifting her little, heavy, snow-bound feet wearily.
“Ellen, I wish you'd tell Maria to turn around and go home,” she said. “Just hear her cough, and out in all this snow, and getting her skirts draggled. She hasn't got common-sense, you tell her so.”
Ellen stopped, nodding assentingly. “I think she's right, Maria,” she said. “You ought not to be out such a morning as this. You had better go home.”
Maria came up smiling, though her lips were quite white, and she controlled her cough to convulsive motions of her chest.