SHE TOWERED ABOVE ELLEN, AN AVENGING FATE
Ellen wrote:—
“I don’t know what it did to me to have it talked about in the open. I felt as if I belonged forever to Roger, as though some way this outward profession of faith of his brought out and made positive everything that he had said and that I had felt, and that we truly belonged to one another.”
The old lady measured the young people with an angry gaze.
“Young man,” said she, “I consider you’ve abused my hospitality; you have put me and my brother and my whole family in a false light before your parents. You entangle yourself in sentimentalities with a married woman, you play false with your sweetheart, and when your father wishes you to reconstruct your life, you throw them both over and place me in the position of having seemed to connive at a marriage with my niece. I shall write your mother my disapproval by the next post, and if Ellen knew as much of your past history as I do, she wouldn’t take this sudden infatuation seriously, and if she had any dignity she would withdraw at once from this false position.”
“Your letter,” Roger replied with some heat, “will reach my mother somewhat after my own. When Ellen’s love for her mother overcame her better judgment and she refused to go with me, I wrote my mother on my return as I told her I would do; and now, permit me, Miss Grant, to withdraw from your house which will save your pride in this matter.”
It was an old-fashioned quarrel that Youth and Age indulged in, and Ellen’s journal gives more of it, full of stately words and innuendo and recriminations cloaked in fine-sounding periods, and I think both Roger and Miss Sarah enjoyed their own rhetoric heartily.
Mrs. Payne heard the noise of the combat, and when Miss Sarah realized that her sister had been, as she said, “an accomplice,” her indignation knew no bounds, though she admitted:—
“I’ll do you justice, Emily; you’ve so little common sense that I don’t suppose for a moment you thought of anything but the sentimentality of this ill-governed young man and your Ellen. You didn’t, I suppose, for a moment consider that Ellen is not the sort of a marriage planned for him by his father.”