a little break in her voice. Now, when she reached the doll,
she gathered her up in her little arms, and groped her way with her
into the closet. She hugged the doll, and kissed her wildly, then
she shook her. "You have been naughty," she whispered--"yes, you
have, dreadful naughty. No, don't you talk to me; you have been
naughty. What right had you to be livin' with rich folks, and
wearin' such fine things, when other children don't have anything.
What right had that little boy that was your mother before I was,
and that rich lady that gave you to me? They had ought to be put in
the closet, too. God had ought to put them all in the closet, the
way I'm goin' to put you. Don't you say a word; you needn't cry;
you've been dreadful naughty."

Ellen set the doll, face to the wall, in the corner of the closet,
and left her there. Then she crept back into bed, and lay there
crying over her precious baby shivering in her thin night-gown all
alone in the dark closet. But she was firm in keeping her there,
since, with that strange, involuntary grasp of symbolism which has
always been maintained by the baby-fingers of humanity for the
satisfying of needs beyond resources and the solving of problems
outside knowledge, she had a conviction that she was, in such
fashion, righting wrong and punishing evil. But she wept over the
poor doll until she fell asleep.

Chapter X

When Ellen woke the next morning she had a curious feeling, as if
she were blinded by the glare of many hitherto unsuspected windows
opening into the greatness outside the little world, just large
enough to contain them, in which she had dwelt all her life with her
parents, her aunt, her grandmother, and her doll. She tried to
adjust herself to her old point of view with her simple childish
recognition of the most primitive facts as a basis for dreams, but
she remembered what Mr. Atkins, who coughed so dreadfully, had said
the night before; she remembered what the young man with the bulging
forehead, who frightened her terribly, had said; she remembered the
gloomy look in her father's face, the misery in her aunt Eva's; and
she remembered her doll in the closet--and either everything was
different or had a different light upon it. In reality Ellen's
evening in the sound and sight of that current of rebellion against
the odds of life which has taken the poor off their foot hold of
understanding since the beginning of the world had aged her. She had
lost