Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/477

 and said the school she attended in Oregon City was not a girl's seminary at all but only a public school. And rather than misrepresent an inevitably increasing age, she adopted an unbroken but gracious reticence towards it; and so fair that she would not furnish it to this biographer because she had never furnished it to others, though, with ingenious accommodation, offering to leave it in an envelope addressed to him as part of her will, a charming bequest of a lovely secret, when you come to think of it. So lacking in jealousy that when one critic called her greater than Joaquin Miller and others said she was almost as great, she kept her admiration for him and quoted some of his lines to keynote her novel, and, when she knew for sure he was greater, declared that statements of his plagiarism were false and that he needed no help to fame. Such engaging instances could be multiplied.

A close woman friend has described her in this way:

"Ella Higginson is five feet five and a half inches tall, of medium complexion, is proud of her very tiny feet, has a large nose, blue eyes, large mouth and a sad, strong face."

Her face was so when she was ten, as has been described, and a dozen portraits of her during various periods of her literary life show an absence alike of gladness and of gravity—no smile, yet no sign so definite as grief; not wistful even; always so wide open, so unhesitant and so clear; the same in surmise and retrospect, the same in the little maiden in Oregon City and the famous woman in Bellingham. Were the cameras wrong? We know her as a witty conversationalist, as fun-loving, as having a lively sense of