<h3 align="center">Chapter XVI</h3>
<p>Ellen, when she graduated, was openly pronounced the flower of her
class. Not a girl equalled her, not a boy surpassed her. When Ellen
came home one night about two months before her graduation, and
announced that she was to have the valedictory, such a light of pure
joy flashed over her mother's face that she looked ten years
younger.</p>
<p>“Well, I guess your father will be pleased enough,”
she said. She was hard at work, finishing women's wrappers of cheap
cotton. The hood industry had failed some time before, since the
hoods had gone out of fashion. The same woman had taken a contract to
supply a large firm with wrappers, and employed many in the
neighborhood, paying them the smallest possible prices. This woman
was a usurer on a scale so pitiful and petty that it almost condoned
usury. Sometimes a man on discovering the miserable pittance for
which his wife toiled during every minute which she could snatch from
her household duties and the care of her children, would inveigh
against it. “That woman is cheating you,” he would say,
to be met with the argument that she herself was only making ten
cents on a wrapper. Looked at in that light, the wretched profit of
the workers did not seem so out of proportion. It was usury in a
nutshell, so infinitesimal as almost to escape detection. Fanny
worked every minute which she could secure on these
wrappers—the ungainly, slatternly home-gear of other poor
women. There was an air of dejected femininity and slipshod drudgery
about every fold of one of them when it was hung up finished. Fanny
used to keep them on a row of hooks in her bedroom until a dozen were
completed, when she carried them to her employer, and Ellen used to
look at them with a sense of depression. She imagined worn, patient
faces of the sisters of poverty above the limp collars, and poor,
veinous hands dangling from the clumsy sleeves.</p>
<p>Fanny would never allow Ellen to assist her in this work, though
she begged hard to do so. “Wait till you get out of
school,” said she. “You've got enough to do while you are
in school.”</p>
<p>When Ellen told her about the valedictory, Fanny was so overjoyed
that she lost sight of her work, and sewed in the sleeves wrong.
“There, only see what you have made me do!” she cried,
laughing with delight at her own folly. “Only see, you have
made me sew in both these sleeves wrong. You are a great child.
Another time you had better keep away with your valedictories till I
get my wrapper finished.” Ellen looked up from the book which
she had taken.</p>
<p>“Let me rip them out for you, mother,” she said.</p>
<p>“No, you keep on with your study—it won't take me but
a minute. I don't know what your father will say. It is a great honor
to be chosen to write the valedictory out of that big class. I guess
your father will be pleased.”</p>
<p>“I hope I can write a good one,” said Ellen.</p>
<p>“Well, if you can't, I'd give up my beat,” said the
mother, looking at her with enthusiasm, and speaking with scornful
chiding. “Why don't you go over and tell your grandmother
Brewster? She'll be tickled 'most to death.”</p>
<p>Ellen had not been gone long when Andrew came home, coming into
the yard, bent as if beneath some invisible burden of toil. Just then
he had work, but not in Lloyd's. He had grown too old for Lloyd's,
and had been discharged long ago.</p>
<p>He had so far been able to conceal from Fanny the fact that he had
withdrawn all his little savings to invest in that mining stock. The
stock had not yet come up, as he had expected. He very seldom had a
circular reporting progress nowadays. When he did have one in the
post-office his heart used to stand still until he had torn open the
envelope and read it. It was uniformly not so hopeful as formerly,
while speciously apologetic. Andrew still had faith, although his
heart was sick with its long deferring. He could not actually believe
that all his savings were gone, sunken out of sight forever in this
awful shaft of miscalculation and misfortune. What he dreaded most
was that Fanny should find out, as she would have to were he long out
of employment.</p>
<p>Andrew, when he entered the house on his return from work, had
come to open a door into the room where his wife was, with a
deprecating and apologetic air. He gained confidence when, after a
few minutes, the sore subject had not been broached.</p>
<p>To-night, as usual, when he came into the sitting-room where Fanny
was sewing it was with a sidelong glance of uneasy deprecation
towards her, and an attempt to speak easily, as if he had nothing on
his mind.</p>
<p>“Pretty warm day,” he began, but his wife cut him
short. She faced around towards him beaming, her work—a pink
wrapper—slid from her lap to the floor.</p>
<p>“What do you think, Andrew?” she said. “What do
you s'pose has happened? Guess.” Andrew laughed gratefully,
and with the greatest alacrity. Surely this was nothing about
mining-stocks, unless, indeed, she had heard, and the stocks had gone
up, but that seemed to much like the millennium. He dismissed that
from his mind before it entered. He stood before her in his worn
clothes. He always wore a collar and a black tie, and his haggard
face was carefully shaven. Andrew was punctiliously neat, on Ellen's
account. He was always thinking, suppose he should meet Ellen coming
home from school, with some young ladies whose fathers were rich and
did not have to work in the shop, how mortified she might feel if he
looked shabby and unkempt.</p>
<p>“Guess, Andrew,” she said.</p>
<p>“What is it?” said Andrew.</p>
<p>“Oh, you guess.”</p>
<p>“I don't see what it can be, Fanny.”</p>
<p>“Well, Ellen has got the valedictory. What's the matter with
you? Be you deaf? Ellen has got the valedictory out of all them girls
and boys.”</p>
<p>“She has, has she?” said Andrew. He dropped into a
chair and looked at his wife. There was something about the intense
interchange of confidence of delight between these two faces of
father and mother which had almost the unrestraint of lunacy.
Andrew's jaw fairly dropped with his smile, which was a silent laugh
rather than a smile; his eyes were wild with delight. “She has,
has she?” he kept repeating.</p>
<p>“Yes, she has,” said Fanny. She tossed her head with
an incomparable pride; she coughed a little, affected cough. “I
s'pose you know what a compliment it is?” said she. “It
means that she's smarter than all them boys and girls—the
smartest one in her whole class.”</p>
<p>“Yes, I s'pose it does,” said Andrew. “So she
has got it! Well!”</p>
<p>“There she comes now,” said Fanny, “and Grandma
Brewster.”</p>
<p>Andrew borrowed money to buy a gold watch and chain for a
graduating gift for his daughter. He would scarcely have essayed
anything quite so magnificent, but Fanny innocently tempted him. The
two had been sitting in the door in the cool of the evening, one day
in June, about two weeks before the graduation, and had just watched
Ellen's light muslin skirts flutter out of sight. She had gone
down-town to purchase some ribbon for her graduating dress—she
and Floretta Vining, who had come over to accompany her. “I
feel kind of anxious to have her have something pretty when she
graduates,” Fanny said, speaking as if she were feeling her way
into a mind of opposition. Neither she nor Andrew had ever owned a
watch, and the scheme seemed to her breathless with magnificence.</p>
<p>“Yes, she ought to have something pretty,” agreed
Andrew.</p>
<p>“I don't want her to feel ashamed when she sees the other
girls' presents,” said Fanny.</p>
<p>“That's so,” assented Andrew.</p>
<p>“Well,” said Fanny, “I've been
thinkin'—”</p>
<p>“What?”</p>
<p>“Well, I've been thinkin' that—of course your mother
is goin' to give her the dress, and that's all, of course, and it's a
real handsome present. I ain't sayin' a word against that; but there
ain't anybody else to give her much except us. Poor Eva 'd like to,
but she can't; it takes all she earns, since Jim's out of work, and I
don't know what she's goin' to do. So that leaves nobody but us, and
I've been thinkin'—I dun'no' what you'll say, Andrew, but I've
been thinkin'—s'pose you took a little money out of the bank,
and—got Ellen—a watch.” Fanny spoke the last word
in a faint whisper. She actually turned pale in the darkness.</p>
<p>“A watch?” repeated Andrew.</p>
<p>“Yes, a watch. I've always wanted Ellen to have a gold watch
and chain. I've always thought she could, and so she could if you
hadn't been out of work so much.”</p>
<p>“Yes, she could,” said Andrew—“a watch and
mebbe a piano. I thought I'd be back in Lloyd's before now. Well,
mebbe I shall before long. They say there's better times comin' by
fall.”</p>
<p>“Well, Ellen will be graduated by that time,” said
Fanny, “and she ought to have the watch now if she's ever goin'
to. She'll never think so much of it. Floretta Vining is goin' to
have a watch, too. Mrs. Cross says her mother told her so; said Mr.
Vining had it all bought—a real handsome one. I don't believe
Sam Vining can afford to buy a gold watch. I don't believe it is all
gold, for my part. They 'ain't got as much as we have, if Sam has had
work steadier. I don't believe it's gold. I don't want Ellen to have
a watch at all unless it's a real good one. It seems to me you'd
better take a little money out and buy her one, Andrew.”</p>
<p>“Well, I'll see,” said Andrew. He had a terrible sense
of guilt before Fanny. Suppose she knew that there was no money at
all in the bank to take out?</p>
<p>“Well, I'll buy her one if you say so,” said he, in a
curious, slow, stern voice. In his heart was a fierce rising of
rebellion, that he, hard-working and frugal and self-denying all his
life, should be denied the privilege of buying a present for his
darling without resorting to deception, and even almost robbery. He
did not at that minute blame himself in the least for his
misadventure with his mining stock. Had not the same relentless
Providence driven him to that also? His weary spirit took for the
first time a poise of utter self-righteousness in opposition to this
Providence, and he blasphemed in his inner closet of self, before the
face of the Lord, as he comprehended it.</p>
<p>“Well, I have a sort of set my heart on it,” said
Fanny.</p>
<p>“She shall have the watch,” repeated Andrew, and his
voice was fairly defiant.</p>
<p>After Fanny had gone into the house and lighted her lamp, and
resumed work on her wrapper, Andrew still sat on the step in the cool
evening. There was a full moon, and great masses of shadows seemed to
float and hover and alight on the earth with a gigantic brooding as
of birds. The trees seemed redoubled in size from the soft
indetermination of the moonlight which confused shadow and light, and
deceived the eye as with soft loomings out of false distances. There
was a tall pine, grown from a sapling since Ellen's childhood, and
that looked more like a column of mist than a tree, but the Norway
spruces clove the air sharply like silhouettes in ink, and outlined
their dark profiles clearly against the silver radiance.</p>
<p>To Andrew, looking at it all, came the feeling of a traveller who
passes all scenes whether of joy or woe, being himself in his passing
the one thing which remains, and somehow he got from it an enormous
comfort.</p>
<p>“We're all travellin' along,” he said aloud, in a
strained, solemn voice.</p>
<p>“What did you say, Andrew?” Fanny called from the open
window.</p>
<p>“Nothin',” replied Andrew.</p>
<div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />