I can see her now drooping up to him and the appealing glance of her large eyes. Presently I saw him take both her hands in his, and then she came toward me, her feet dancing, a glad, naughty look in her eyes. She answered my glance of inquiry with:—
“He asked me why I told him what I did, and, since I was telling the whole truth, I answered, ‘I wanted awfully to have you like me.’”
That, you see, is what I got for interfering with my friend and torturing her.
CHAPTER VIII
The next few weeks there were very few entries.
Ellen was very bad at mathematics, and her uncle, who rarely left his seclusion to interest himself in her affairs and who merely enjoyed her personality, thought it would be a fine plan if this responsible young man should give his Ellen lessons. Mr. Grant was advanced in his theories concerning the female brain, which, he said, lost its vagueness and inexactnesses through a mathematical training. Ellen merely makes a note of this.
There are very few entries in her journal at this time, for she was playing with the great forces of life. God help us all! We didn’t know passion when it came to us, nor how should we? It was the warp on which were woven all our generous impulses, all our high idealisms, making in all the shimmering garments in which we clothed our fragile, newborn spirits.
Ellen walked in a magic circle of her own ignorance, never dreaming of love or of being in love. So absorbed was she that it seemed like some one walking down a road that leads directly into a swift-flowing river, and not knowing that the river was there until one had walked directly into it. So close is the so-called silly moment of girlhood to the moment of full development, that when the change comes it sometimes takes only overnight. It was only a few pages, after all, that separated Ellen, who managed to do the minister’s dishes by pretending that she was his second wife, from the Ellen who wrote:—
“I don’t know how to begin what I am going to say. I thought everybody in the world must know what had happened to me. I thought my face must shine with it. I thought I must look like some one very different from myself,—like a woman, perhaps. I came home through Lincoln Field and squeezed myself through a hole in the fence so no one could see me. I came up the back way to my room and locked the door. My heart beat both ways at once when I looked in the glass, but I looked just the same as before I went out—as before he kissed me. I went downstairs and my hand seemed too heavy to open the door and go in where I heard their voices. I was afraid to go because I felt: ‘They will know, they will know!’ Mr. Sylvester and mamma and Aunt Sarah were there. ‘Where have you been?’ said mamma. And I could not answer. I felt I had been gone so long and so far. I could hear the blood beating in my ears, and when my aunt said: ‘I wish, Ellen, you would stand up straighter,’ I could hardly lift my head.”