As for Ellen, she accepted Alec’s companionship as a matter of course. She had no doubts at all about Alec’s devotion to Elizabeth, for Elizabeth was one who compelled sweetness when one spoke of her. She was a little person, appealing and soft, and the sort of woman who attends to the physical wants of the man she loves so kindly that this devotion is almost spiritual. It never occurred to Ellen that she still held any place in Alec’s heart or that his early affection for her had been anything more than a boyish devotion he had outgrown for a real love. I think through the autumn and long winter, they both lived in the radiance of their affection for one another; they two were in the light together and the past and future were shut out. Perhaps they were better friends that they were not lovers. They both lived like children in the present, neither one looking into the future, when Alec should no longer be hers, but another woman’s.
“It’s good [she wrote] to have something that lasts in one’s life. Never for a moment, in all that I’ve lived through, has my affection faltered for Alec, nor his for me. We have each of us had more absorbing loves than each other, but this steady little flame remains unquenched.”
I think in their mutual satisfaction and the consciousness of their own virtue, they did not realize, as high-minded people often do, how this flowering friendship might affect a smaller nature. Elizabeth grew restless under it, and Miss Sarah found out from gossiping people that Elizabeth had not scrupled to do what was little short of spying on Alec.
“I hope,” she said to Ellen, “that you’re worldly wise enough not to make trouble. Of course, we know that Alec might as well be your brother, but a young woman in love can’t be expected to realize it.”
Alec was supremely unaware of any discontent on Elizabeth’s part; he went over to see her as regularly as he had come home while he was in college, and whatever she felt she kept to herself. I fancy that Alec, whimsical and humorous, large-hearted and kind, would have been hard to approach with a small jealousy. Once in the light of his smile it would have withered up.
It was after more and more of this talk had come to Ellen that I find, for the first time, in her journal a note of emotion about Alec.
“When I hear them tell all the little things she does against you, Alec, my heart weeps, for if she’s like that, I must watch you start out on a road of long disillusionment. It’s so hard to sit aside and watch sadness and even disgust grow in your eyes, that my heart is heavy, and with unshed tears. What will happen to you whose goodness has come out to meet the goodness in me all your life? Either your own goodness will burn up the you that loves her, or the you that loves her will eat and corrode the you I love. I hope for you the high unhappiness and the sad and hard-gained peace rather than the contented compromise with the little, mean virtues that act as anodynes. Whatever happens to the outward aspect of your life, I wish for you that your spirit may walk free; but oh! I shan’t be there to help you in the hard places, I shan’t be able to hold out my hand to you as yours has been held out to me.”
It was only when she realized that Alec was going out into a life fraught with difficulties for him, since he loved a woman who had it in her power to hurt him so, that Ellen looked at the future, empty of her friend. From this time her journal is full of Elizabeth. From a woman to be taken for granted, some one sweet whom Alec loved, she became a sinister menace. In her little soft person she carried the unhappiness of what had been sweetest in Ellen’s life.