“I asked Aunt Sarah if she wanted me to get her some more yarn when hers ran short. She answered, ‘Yes, you may, though I wish, Ellen, my dear child, that you were as eager to do your work as you are to wait on others.’ But I knew all the time that I offered to go because I hoped that I should see him, and I should have told my aunt that that was why I offered.”
A few days later comes the touching little expression of the desire of the eyes:—
“Last week I walked all over town to catch glimpses of him. I went to the post-office, and he wasn’t there; I went down past the school-house and past his house, and whenever I saw a boy coming toward me, it was hard to breathe. The whole day was empty and I thought it would never be night.”
Again:—
“To-day I saw him; he passed by me and just said, ‘Hulloa, Ellen.’ When I stopped for a moment, I thought he would speak to me. In school this morning he stopped and talked, but all my words went away and I seemed so stupid. At night I make up things I would like to say to him, and when he stops for a moment,—oh, he stops so seldom,—I forget them all.”
Throughout all this, not once does she use the word love. From that terrible and impersonal longing, unaware of itself and unrecognized, Ellen walked out toward the long-trousered boy. She spread before him as much as she could of her little shy sweetnesses. She walked up and down the silent streets waiting for him. Later she writes: “I had no single reason in the world for liking him.”
I was with Ellen at the moment of her disillusion. We were out walking together when Arthur McLain came toward us. Ahead of us, tail wagging, ran the beloved mongrel Faro. He stopped to sniff at Arthur. Arthur shooed him away. He was a lad timid about dogs, it seems. Faro saw his nervousness, and, for deviltry, barked. Arthur kicked at him with the savageness of fear.
I can see Ellen now gathering her dog to her with one regal sweep of the hand and walking past the boy, her head erect, her cheeks scarlet.
“I hate a coward,” she said to me in a low, tense voice; and later with a flaming look, “I would have killed him with my hands if he had hurt Faro,” she cried.
So humiliated was she that she says no word in her journal for her reason for her change of heart. She could not forgive him for having made a fool of herself about him—about one so unworthy. For of all things in the world hard to forgive, this is the hardest.