They were headstrong, violent-tempered women, but she had an instinct for the staple qualities below that surface turbulence, which was lashed higher by every gust of opposition.
These two loud, contending voices, which filled the house before and after shop-hours--for Eva worked in the shop with her brother-in-law--with a duet of discords instead of harmonies, meant no more to Ellen than the wrangle of the robins in the cherry-trees.
She supposed that two sisters always conversed in that way.

She never knew why her father, after a fiery but ineffectual attempt to quell the feminine tumult, would send her across the east yard to her grandmother Brewster's, and seat himself on the east door-step in summer, or go down to the store in the winter.

She would sit at the window in her grandmother's sitting-room, eating peacefully the slice of pound-cake or cooky with which she was always regaled, and listen to the scolding voices across the yard as she might have listened to any outside disturbance.

She was never sucked into the whirlpool of wrath which seemed to gyrate perpetually in her home, and wondered at her grandmother Brewster's impatient exclamations concerning the poor child, and her poor boy, and that it was a shame and a disgrace, when now and then a louder explosion of wrath struck her ears.
Ellen's grandmother--Mrs.Zelotes Brewster, as she was called, though her husband Zelotes had been dead for many years--was an aristocrat by virtue of inborn prejudices and convictions, in despite of circumstances.

The neighbors said that Mrs.Zelotes Brewster had always been high-feeling, and had held up her head with the best.