When Edward Graham moralized on the subject Ellen replied flippantly:—
“It is that you and everybody else criticize anything you’re not used to. What’s the harm in hens; what evil does bringing a hen into the minister’s house lead to? Does it make you want to go and take the amber beads off a baby’s neck just because I brought in a hen and it perched on John Seymore’s shoulder? John Seymore didn’t mind it, and he’s studying for the ministry. It is people like you, who talk about an innocent thing like a hen, and fuss over it as if it was something bad, who do harm,” cried Ellen; and she swept me along with her. She comments in this fashion about the episode:—
“At the party we were all very happy, and there’s no rule that says that a thing must be of a worthy sort before we may laugh at it. That’s one of the nice things about laughing, there’s no rhyme or reason to it. It was not among those things that mother talks of that undermine our fineness of perception. But Mr. Sylvester didn’t realize how people were going to feel about it, and now they are all talking and tongue-wagging as though something terrible had happened. Am I wrong, or are they? I think they are, and I hate them for it, and I feel as though that was the worst thing I had done, because I hate poor Edward Graham and I hate Mrs. Snow and Miss Barton because of their smallness and injustice; and aren’t they more wicked to talk about innocent things and gossip about young people and make those who are happy feel uncomfortable and sinful? It makes me want to break a window when I think how virtuous they feel.”
We hadn’t heard the last of the talk concerning the “Hen Party.” Rumors of it reached our ears from all sides. I suppose our elders exaggerated the talk, that we might learn decorum. Personally I could not imagine, any more than Ellen could, just what harm the hens had been supposed to have done us. One of the hardest things for me now to understand is the annoyance so many people feel at the sweet, noisy fun of young people. It seems to me the very laughter of fairyland, but older people have a way of turning the fairy coach of mirth into a pumpkin drawn by mice, and are proud of themselves for doing this.
It is strange that the ages of men have rolled on one after the other without this being a basic principle laid down to all parents—you can’t disapprove a child into the paths of virtue any more than you can scold a man into loving his wife.
There are a great many young people who are made reckless and sullen by such disapproval, though Ellen was saved from the harm that Edward Graham and the public opinion of which he was the voice might have done her by the utter sympathy of her little mother. She joined in all our little gayeties; she laughed with us. So did Mr. Sylvester. He attended the next two or three young people’s parties, explaining to Ellen with his gentleness: “They say, my dear, that I’m not a fit guide for youth, so I am going to try and learn to be so by being more with you.”
Of course, for their pains, these two grown-up children of God were called overindulgent; it was prophesied that they would spoil us; yet it was this that kept Ellen’s audacities always sweet.
However, even so, Ellen’s future destiny was despaired of by Edward Graham.
“Ellen is in danger of becoming a jilt,” he told me.
“She can’t help it if people like her,” said I; for I, myself, had changed a great deal from that rigorous opinion that one should be proposed to only by the man one intends to marry.