The Portion of Labor | Page 6

and she never screamed or shouted when excited. Instead of catching
the motion of the wind, she still lay before it, like some
slender-stemmed flower. If Ellen had made much outcry with the hurt
in her heart and the smart of her knee, she might have been heard, for
the locality was thickly settled, though not in the business portion of
the little city. The houses, set prosperously in the midst of shaven
lawns--for this was a thrifty and emulative place, and democracy held
up its head confidently--were built closely along the road, though that
was lonely and deserted at that hour. It was the hour between half-past
six and half-past seven, when people were lingering at their
supper-tables, and had not yet started upon their evening pursuits. The
lights shone for the most part from the rear windows of the houses, and
there was a vague compound odor of tea and bread and beefsteak in the
air. Poor Ellen had not had her supper; the wrangle at home had
dismissed it from everybody's mind. She felt more pitiful towards her
mother and herself when she smelt the food and reflected upon that. To
think of her going away without any supper, all alone in the dark night!
There was no moon, and the solemn brilliancy of the stars made her
think with a shiver of awe of the Old Testament and the possibility of
the Day of Judgment. Suppose it should come, and she all alone out in
the night, in the midst of all those worlds and the great White Throne,
without her mother? Ellen's grandmother, who was of a stanch
orthodox breed, and was, moreover, anxious to counteract any possible

detriment as to religious training from contact with the degenerate
Louds of Loudville, had established a strict course of Bible study for
her granddaughter at a very early age. All celestial phenomena were in
consequence transposed into a Biblical key for the child, and she
regarded the heavens swarming with golden stars as a Hebrew child of
a thousand years ago might have done.
She was glad when she came within the radius of a street light from
time to time; they were stationed at wide intervals in that neighborhood.
Soon, however, she reached the factories, when all mystery and awe,
and vague terrors of what beside herself might be near unrevealed
beneath the mighty brooding of the night, were over. She was, as it
were, in the mid-current of the conditions of her own life and times,
and the material force of it swept away all symbolisms and unstable
drift, and left only the bare rocks and shores of existence. Always when
the child had been taken by one of her elders past the factories,
humming like gigantic hives, with their windows alert with eager eyes
of toil, glancing out at her over bench and machine, Ellen had seen her
secretly cherished imaginings recede into a night of distance like stars,
and she had felt her little footing upon the earth with a shock, and had
clung more closely to the leading hand of love. "That's where your poor
father works," her grandmother would say. "Maybe you'll have to work
there some day," her aunt Eva had said once; and her mother, who had
been with her also, had cried out sharply as if she had been stung, "I
guess that little delicate thing ain't never goin' to work in a shoe-shop,
Eva Loud." And her aunt Eva had laughed, and declared with emphasis
that she guessed there was no need to worry yet awhile.
"She never shall, while I live," her mother had cried; and then Eva,
coming to her sister's aid against her own suggestion, had declared,
with a vehemence which frightened Ellen, that she would burn the shop
down herself first.
As for Ellen's father, he never at that time dwelt upon the child's future
as much as his wife did, having a masculine sense of the instability of
houses of air which prevented him from entering them without a
shivering of walls and roof into naught but star-mediums by his

downrightness of vision. "Oh, let the child be, can't you, Fanny?" he
said, when his wife speculated whether Ellen would be or do this or
that when she should be a woman. He resented the conception of the
woman which would swallow up, like some metaphysical sorceress, his
fair little child. So when he now and then led Ellen past the factories it
was never with the slightest surmise as to any connection which she
might have with them beyond the present one. "There's the shop where
father works," he would tell Ellen, with a tender sense of his own
importance in his child's eyes, and he was as proud as Punch when
Ellen