e to
you ... our excitement when Nelse begins to look about him for a wife. In
the first place, we are saved by our enforced closeness to real people
from wasting our energies in the profitless outcry of economists that
people like Nelse should be prohibited from having children. It occurs to
us that perhaps the handsome fellow's immense good-humor and generosity
are as good inheritance as the selfishness and cold avarice of priggish
young Horace Gallatin, who never drinks a drop. Perhaps at some future
date all people who are not perfectly worthy to have children will be kept
from it by law. In Hillsboro, we think, that after such a decree the human
race would last just one generation; but that is not the point now. The
question is, will Nelse find a wife who will carry on his mother's work,
or will he not?

If you think you are excited over a serial story because you can't guess
if "Lady Eleanor" really stole the diamonds or not, it is only because you
have no idea of what excitement is. You are in a condition of stagnant
lethargy compared to that of Hillsboro over the question whether Nelse
will marry Ellen Brownell, "our Ellen," or Flossie Merton, the ex-factory
girl, who came up from Albany to wait at the tavern, and who is said to
have a taste for drink herself.

Old Mrs. Perkins, whom everybody had thought sunk in embittered discontent
about the poverty and isolation of her last days, roused herself not long
ago and gave Ellen her cherished tortoise-shell back-comb, and her pretty
white silk shawl to wear to village parties; and racked with rheumatism,
as the old woman is, she says she sits up at night to watch the young
people go back from choir rehearsal so that she can see which girl Nelse
is "beauing home." Could the most artfully contrived piece of fiction more
blessedly sweep the self-centered complainings of old age into generous
and vitalizing interest in the lives of others?

As for the "pity and terror," the purifying effects of which are so
vaunted in Greek tragedies, could Aeschylus himself have plunged us into a
more awful desolation of pity than the day we saw old Squire Marvin being
taken along the street on his way to the insane asylum? All the self-made
miseries of his long life were in our minds, the wife he had loved and
killed with the harsh violence of a nature he had never learned to
control, the children he had adored unreasonably and spoiled and turned
against, and they on him with a vio