At all events she was silent, and opposed successfully her one little new will to the onslaught of all those older and more experienced ones before her, though nobody knew at what cost of agony to herself.

She had always been a singularly docile and obedient child; this was the first persistent disobedience of her whole life, and it reacted upon herself with a cruel spiritual hurt.
She sat clasping the great doll, the pinks, and the pink cup and saucer before her on the table--a lone little weak child, opposing her single individuality against so many, and to her own hurt and horror and self-condemnation, and she did not weaken; but all at once her head drooped on one side, and her father caught her.
"There! you can all stop tormentin' this blessed child!" he cried.
"Ellen, Ellen, look at Father! Oh, mother, look here; she's fainted dead away!" "Fanny!" When Ellen came to herself she was on the bed in her mother's room, and her aunt Eva was putting some of her beautiful cologne on her head, and her mother was trying to make her drink water, and her grandmother had a glass of her currant wine, and they were calling to her with voices of far-off love, as if from another world.
And after that she was questioned no more about her mysterious journey.
"Wherever she has been, she has got no harm," said Mrs.Zelotes Brewster, "and there's no use in trying to drive a child, when it comes of our family.

She's got some notion in her head, and you've got to leave her alone to get over it.

She's got back safe and sound, and that's the main thing." "I wish I knew where she got those things," Fanny said.

Looseness of principle as to property rights was not as strange to her imagination as to that of her mother-in-law.
For a long time afterwards she passed consciously and uneasily by cups and saucers in stores, and would not look their way lest she should see the counterpart of Ellen's, which was Sevres, and worth more than the whole counterful, had she only known it, and she hurried past the florists who displayed pinks in their windows.