they were too far away and she was still too young, too egoistic, to understand the burning romance that lay in them.
It was only Lily who interested her, and with Lily she had been able to make no progress. Her cousin was placed opposite her, between Charles Tolliver and his son Fergus; and between these two Lily divided her attention, save in those moments when the stentorian tones of the Red Old Scot drowned all conversation. Even the boy she addressed with as much charm and as much interest as if he had been the most fascinating of men; and Fergus, young though he was, had been affected. His clear blue eyes, half-hidden by dark lashes, glowed with a naïve pleasure. Ellen, watching the pair, understood suddenly that this brother, so fascinated by the woman beside him, would one day escape as Lily had escaped. It was easy for him; it was easy for any man. For a girl to escape was a different matter. Yet, sitting there wrapped in despair, she planned how she might help him if she were the first to make her way into the world.
For Fergus exerted upon her a strange effect of softening. His fanciful mind she alone understood, and there were times in the long winter evenings when it was to him alone that she played her savage music. His shyness, which, unlike hers, lacked all the quality of savagery, aroused in her a fierce instinct of protection. There were times when the sight of his clear eyes, his blond curly head and snub nose filled her with an unaccountable melancholy and foreboding.
Sometimes during the dinner Ellen turned at the sound of a loud, rasping voice to regard her cousin Eva Barr, who sat by the side of Irene discussing harshly their work among the poor. Something about the horse-faced spinster filled her with a vague terror. It was as if Eva Barr stood as a symbol of that which a courageous, strong-minded woman might become if kept too long imprisoned. To Ellen, turning these things over secretly in her mind, it seemed that the way of her own destiny lay before her, branching now into two paths. At the end of the one stood the glowing Lily and at the end of the other Eva Barr, baffled
