"There's others that I should rather have Ellen thick with," said she.

"I 'ain't nothin' against the Atkinses, but they can't have been as well brought up as some, they have had so little to do with, and their mother's been ailin' so long." "Ellen may as well begin as she can hold out, and be intimate with them that will be intimate with her," Eva said, rather bitterly.

Eva was married by this time, and living with Jim and his mother.

She wore in those days an expression of bitterly defiant triumph and happiness, as of one who has wrested his sweet from fate under the ban of the law, and is determined to get the flavor of it though the skies fall.

"I suppose I did wrong marrying Jim," she often told her sister, "but I can't help it." "Maybe Jim will get work before long," her sister would say, consolingly.
"I have about given up," Eva would reply.