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believe he was engaged to marry one of the Brigham girls, very rich, very pretty. Sad. I think her name was Florence. John had quite an eye for the ladies.”
    But Mrs. Porter was gazing suspiciously at her husband. Was Edgar “drinking” again, after his many promises? He gave her a beatific smile, and she was infuriated. She had never forgiven him for buying that farm and moving to Preston, for all he had become the Mayor and so the most important man in the village.

C H A P T E R   2
    ELLEN, GUILTY ONCE MORE, sipped a spoonful of the cooling liquid in the bowl of vegetables and pork. Then she put it in the kitchen safe and covered it carefully. She then proceeded to clean the kitchen floor, the bare wooden table, and the two old-fashioned chairs. She polished the warm stove, washed the window, rinsed out the three dish towels and other cottons, then went into the other rooms, her own minute bedroom without a window; it contained but her narrow bed, neatly covered with a white sheet, and a small commode which held her few articles of clothing. Here she dusted and straightened, glanced with regret into the crocked mirror over the commode. After this she went into her aunt’s bedroom, where she repeated her duties. Following this she opened a door and went into the “parlor,” a room hardly larger than the bedrooms, but here, according to May Watson, there was a “richness.” The furniture consisted of a real mahogany settee, all twisted wood and verdigris velvet, the wood scarred but brilliantly polished, the velvet worn down to the nap. A similar chair stood near the tiny little window, the only window in the house which possessed a curtain, and this of coarse machine lace starched to the stiffness of cardboard and almost of that texture. There was a square of imitation Brussels rug on the floor, the rose pattern nearly obliterated by time and constant cleaning. A little table close to the settee held an old lamp, unexpectedly elegant with crystal drops and a chased white shade shaped like a bell. Here, on this table, lay Ellen’s beloved Bible, but only she read it. Unlike the other rooms, plastered and stained with damp, this room had wallpaper, painfully and inaccurately hung by May, and it was of a violently rose design, roses like carmine cabbages valorously leading vines of an intense and improbable green. Ellen hated this wallpaper, which May considered “grand.” The vines seemed, to Ellen, to writhe and to choke and the enormous roses were like large blobs of blood among them. However, she always assured her aunt that the paper was indeed “grand,” and worthy of the most expensive rooms in town, even while she inwardly cringed. At these times she felt an emotion which she did not know was an internal weeping, dark with sorrow.
    It was very rare that she and May ever entered this sacred room except on holidays such as Christmas or Easter, or on the visit of the very infrequent lady, usually a client seeking May’s expert alterations on a cloak or a dress or a robe. Behind the settee, discreetly hidden, was May’s elderly treadle sewing machine, which she had bought for two dollars ten years ago. It had a ‘real” walnut case, and was polished as assiduously as the other furniture, and cared for with anxious zeal, for it stood between woman and niece and starvation. It was not beautiful, but it had utility, and henceforth worth, and so Ellen admired and cherished it. To her still unformed mind a thing should be either bright with beauty, for beauty was its reason for existence, or it should be useful, for labor itself had sanctity, and was muscular and strong. Ellen dusted every spotless surface, moved the chair an inch nearer the window, and avoided looking at the wallpaper.
    She took the washed and wet towels and sheets out to the clothesline in the yellowing backyard. This yard had a low picket fence which May had zealously whitewashed; the outhouse was also whitewashed and stood proudly at the