It was just now, however, that she learned something about Miss Sarah Grant that touched her and made her wish to put her newborn feelings toward life into immediate action. Miss Grant, who had always lectured us severely, it now seemed had defended Ellen against all comments.
“I enjoy the child’s high spirits,” we found her to have said. “This town should not expect conventional actions from the Grants in inessentials.”
Finding this out, Ellen said to me:—
“She wants a sign of my industry; I’m going to buy her something beautiful.”
“What with?” I asked, because actual money was scarce in the Payne household, and their tiny income was eked out by trading eggs and other things at the store; for in a day when most people raised everything themselves it was desperately hard for two ladies to make actual money.
“Well,” considered Ellen, “Mrs. Salesby has gone away.”
Mrs. Salesby was a gentlewoman who copied Mr. Sylvester’s sermons, his handwriting being quite illegible. The sum paid for this work was trifling, the work demanded, long and laborious, and Ellen’s handwriting I might call temperamental. Mr. Sylvester was at this time having a book of his sermons, which he called “Thoughts on Life,” copied. So for long hours Ellen shut herself in Mr. Sylvester’s dust-covered study and copied the inspired wanderings of his spirit which was what his sermons really were.
Living in such intimacy with his thoughts had a further effect on her mind. They were the musings of a mystic who was not too acquainted with the infantile tongue which mysticism must perforce employ since it forever and ever has tried to impress the emotions for which the spoken language has not yet coined exact phrases. Something of his inner meaning came to Ellen. She worked on with a serene joy.
At this time also Edward Graham ceased to be a disturbing presence in her life; for feeling the need of showing Alec the sort of a girl she was she told him her whole little story and he had applied to it the youth’s rule-of-thumb logic and saw the thing as it really was. He gave Ellen the first sensible talk she had ever had on her relations with men.
As for Ellen’s calm acceptance of Alec’s devotion, she used the sophistries with which women from all time have accepted the sweet, undimmed love of those whom they consider boys. “He would, of course,”—writes the candid Ellen,—“have cared for some one anyway at this time, and it is better that he should care for me because I place real value on his affection and try myself to be good so that I shall never hurt them.”