isit to Breckon, who dictates his
sermons, if they are sermons, taking a stenographer with him, and the
young lady, who is in deadly terror of the colonel's driving, is of the
greatest use to him, in the case of veterans who will not or cannot
give down (as they say in their dairy-country parlance), and has already
rescued many reminiscences from perishing in their faltering memories.
She writes them out in the judge's library when the colonel gets home,
and his wife sometimes surprises Mr. Kenton correcting them there at
night after she supposes he has gone to bed.

Since it has all turned out for the best concerning Bittridge, she no
longer has those pangs of self-reproach for Richard's treatment of
him which she suffered while afraid that if the fact came to Ellen's
knowledge it might make her refuse Breckon. She does not find her
daughter's behavior in the matter so anomalous as it appears to the
judge.

He is willing to account for it on the ground of that inconsistency
which he has observed in all human behavior, but Mrs. Kenton is not
inclined to admit that it is so very inconsistent. She contends that
Ellen had simply lived through that hateful episode of her psychological
history, as she was sure to do sooner or later and as she was destined
to do as soon as some other person arrived to take her fancy.

If this is the crude, common-sense view of the matter, Ellen herself is
able to offer no finer explanation, which shall at the same time be more
thorough. She and her husband have not failed to talk the affair over,
with that fulness of treatment which young married people give their
past when they have nothing to conceal from each other. She has
attempted to solve the mystery by blaming herself for a certain
essential levity of nature which, under all her appearance of gravity,
sympathized with levity in others, and, for what she knows to the
contrary, with something ignoble and unworthy in them. Breckon, of
course, does not admit this, but he has suggested that she was first
attracted to him by a certain unseriousness which reminded her of
Bittridge, in enabling him to take her seriousness lightly. This is the
logical inference which he makes from her theory of herself, but she
insists that it does not follow; and she contends that she was moved to
love him by an instant sense of his goodness, which she never lost, and
in which she was trying to equal herself with him by even the desperate
measure of renoun