The day came at last to take their fearsome step into a new home. Ellen wept a little over her farewells, but on such a lovely morning she could not be sad very long. She felt so good, so well, and in the new clothes she had bought for this event she radiated unaccustomed health.
“Look at you,” said the doctor. “I told you it would be good medicine. If your old friends could see you they wouldn’t know it was the same Ellen.”
She blushed. She had never expected to leave the hospital so merry. In a few moments they were driving along in a new-fangled thing called a taxicab, and she had to hold the baby carefully to keep it from bumping. It was the first time she had ever ridden in an automobile, but her thoughts were too far ahead to concern themselves with the novelty. A year ago it would have been a great adventure.
First of all she reflected:
“When Moira is grown up she will love me, and we will do so many nice things together.” Then she thought, “Who knows, Moira may have a father some day, and never be the wiser.”
The doctor had decided that she was to be known as Mrs. Williams at the Blaydons’. “Aunt Mathilda” herself had suggested this, and Ellen was willing enough to consent. But she accepted with greater reluctance his proposal of a gold band for her finger. The idea smacked of a deception that was too bold by far, a deception that involved higher powers than those of earthly authority, in her mind. She felt almost a criminal whenever she looked at it.
The rattling vehicle swung through an impressive high gate and they were looking down between a row of trees. To their left, running straight through the middle of the thoroughfare lay a grass grown parkway so dotted with shrubs that she got only fleeting glimpses of the houses on the other side. Those on her own side she gazed at with wonder. They were set far apart, with generous lawns, and the suggestion of gardens farther back behind walls and iron grill work. The big houses revealed their age, not only by their old-fashioned and heterogeneous architecture, but by the smoke-grimed look of their brick and stone.
“How lovely and peaceful,” thought Ellen, fascinated at the fresh sight of green everywhere spotted and patched with sunlight. She seemed to have been wearing dark glasses for months and months.... She noticed that the driver was slowing down his vehicle and was craning his neck for the house numbers.
“My land,” she murmured, “we’re going to live here.... Look, Moira, look!” she could not help but cry aloud—and then flushed pink when she saw the doctor had heard the name.
This was Trezevant Place, its fame already beginning to dwindle, so that Ellen, acquainted only with the new city, had heard of it but once or twice. For two generations the patrician families had housed there, and a few of the original owners had remained, standing on their dignity, defying the relentless town, which had long sprawled up to it, and around it and far beyond, unsightly, clamorous and vulgar. The snob that is in everybody claimed Ellen at that moment and she longed for an audience of Meadowburns and Potters to watch them disembark.