he white crow, modified among
law-abiding humans into tacit repudiation. It is a sound enough social
principle to distrust that which is not understood, like the strain of
temperament inarticulate but vaguely manifest in the Murchisons. Such
a strain may any day produce an eccentric or a genius, emancipated from
the common interests, possibly inimical to the general good; and when,
later on, your genius takes flight or your eccentric sells all that he
has and gives it to the poor, his fellow townsmen exchange shrewd nods
before the vindicating fact.

Nobody knew it at all in Elgin, but this was the Murchisons' case. They
had produced nothing abnormal, but they had to prove that they weren't
going to, and Stella was the last and most convincing demonstration.
Advena, bookish and unconventional, was regarded with dubiety. She was
out of the type; she had queer satisfactions and enthusiasms. Once as a
little girl she had taken a papoose from a drunken squaw and brought it
home for her mother to adopt. Mrs Murchison's reception of the suggested
duty may be imagined, also the comments of acquaintances--a trick like
that! The inevitable hour arrived when she should be instructed on
the piano, and the second time the music teacher came her pupil was
discovered on the roof of the house, with the ladder drawn up after
her. She did not wish to learn the piano, and from that point of vantage
informed her family that it was a waste of money. She would hide in
the hayloft with a novel; she would be off by herself in a canoe at
six o'clock in the morning; she would go for walks in the rain of windy
October twilights and be met kicking the wet leaves along in front of
her "in a dream." No one could dream with impunity in Elgin, except
in bed. Mothers of daughters sympathized in good set terms with Mrs
Murchison. "If that girl were mine--" they would say, and leave you with
a stimulated notion of the value of corporal punishment. When she took
to passing examinations and teaching, Elgin considered that her parents
ought to be thankful in the probability that she had escaped some
dramatic end. But her occupation further removed her from intercourse
with the town's more exclusive circles: she had taken a definite line,
and she pursued it, preoccupied. If she was a brand snatched from the
burning, she sent up a little curl of reflection in a safe place, where
she was not further interrupted.

Abby, inheriting all these prejudices, had ne