She did not shrink from Cynthia any more then, but suffered her to lift her out of bed as if she were a baby and set her on a white fur rug, into which her feet sank, to her astonishment.  Her mother had only drawn-in rugs, which Ellen had watched her make.  She was a little afraid of the fur rug.

Ellen was very small, and seemed much younger than she was by reason of her baby silence and her little clinging ways.  Then, too, she had always been so petted at home, and through never going to school had not been in contact with other children.  Often the bloom of childhood is soonest rubbed off by friction with its own kind.  Diamond cut diamond holds good in many cases.

Cynthia did not think she was more than six years old, and never dreamed of allowing her to dress herself, and indeed the child had always been largely assisted in so doing.  Cynthia washed her and dressed her, and curled her hair, and led her down-stairs into the dining-room of the night before, which Ellen still regarded with wise eyes as the store.  Then she sat in the tall chair which must have been vacated by that mysterious other child, and had her breakfast, eating her new-laid egg, which the black woman broke for her, while she leaned delicately away as far as she could with a timid shrug of her little shoulder, and sipping her chocolate out of the beautiful pink-and-gold cup.  That, however, Ellen decided within herself was not nearly as pretty as one with “A Gift of Friendship” on it in gilt letters which her grandmother kept on the whatnot in her best parlor.  This had been given to her aunt Ellen, who died when she was a young girl, and was to be hers when she grew up.  She did not care as much for the egg and toast either as for the griddle-cakes and maple syrup at home.  All through breakfast Cynthia talked to her, and in such manner as the child had never heard.  That fine voice, full of sweetest modulations and cadences, which used the language with the precision of a musician, was as different from the voices at home with their guttural slurs and maimed terminals as the song of a spring robin from the scream of the parrot which Ellen could hear in some distant room.  And what Cynthia said was as different from ordinary conversation to the child as a fairy tale, being interspersed with terms of endearment which her mother and grandmother would have considered high-flown, and have been shamefaced in employing, and full of a whimsical playfulness which had an undertone of pathos in it.  Cynthia was not still for a minute, and seemed to feel that much of her power lay in her speech and voice, like some enchantress who cast her spell by means of her silver tongue.  Nobody knew how she dreaded that outcry of Ellen’s, “I want my mother!” It gave her the sensations of a murderess, even while she persisted in her crime.  So she talked, diverting the child’s mind from its natural channel by sheer force of eloquence.  She told a story about the parrot, which caused Ellen’s eyes to widen with thoughtful wonder; she promised her treasures and pleasures which made her mouth twitch into smiles in spite of herself; but with all her efforts, when after breakfast they went into another room, Ellen broke out again, “I want my mother!”