Page:Possession (1926).pdf/113

 But that doesn't make it right. . . . It's not the fashion, at least not in the Town. And that's where you're living."

For the first time Ellen smiled, in her old secretive fashion, as if she and Lily had entered upon some dark compact.

"It was just what Lily said. Rats are silly things, anyway."

"They'll laugh at you," continued her mother, with an air of feeling her way. "Young men don't like girls to be different. It makes them seem eccentric."

Ellen must have known, in her shrewd way, that her mother was not speaking frankly. She knew beyond all doubt that her mother was not concerned with what the young men would think. She was talking thus because she saw these things—the rat, the corsets, the new air—all as signs of something far deeper. She was fighting against the escape of her child, battling to keep her always.

"Yes, they would laugh, wouldn't they?" remarked Ellen presently. And then, quite suddenly, the timbre of her voice changed. "Well, let 'em," she added abruptly.

As if she saw the beginnings of a storm, her mother sighed, turned away and observed casually, "Gramp has started to wander about again. It worries me."

But Ellen swept past her and placing her handbag on the dining room table, she opened it, saying, "Lily gave me some clothes."

"You shouldn't have taken them. I don't want Lily making paupers of us."

"I thought about that," said Ellen with an air of reflection. "But you don't understand Lily. . . . It wasn't like that at all. She doesn't do things that way. . . . She gave them to me as a present, the way she might have given me a book."

For a time there was a silence during which Ellen proceeded with the unpacking of her bag. Reverently, almost with an air of worship, she took out from among her own threadbare clothes