"How many bones are there in the human body?"
"Round like a ball and flattened at the poles."
"Are you going to let Matthew do all your knowing?"
Tears came again into Ellen's eyes. Matthew had abandoned her.
"I'm at the head of my class," she boasted in feeble self-defense. "I can write good compositions and do any kind of examples and I'm excellent in geography."
"I should think it would be a very simple matter to stand at the head of your class!"
"It is," confessed Ellen. "I don't work hard at all."
But now Ellen worked very hard. In the next half-hour her father drew from her small head all the knowledge which it contained and tried to find a great deal more than had been put there. A few times, for sheer nervousness and shame, she cried. The amount of her knowledge seemed infinitesimal, the abyss of her ignorance unfathomable. It was all the more humiliating because when the catechization was over, her father started to the house without reproving her for her dullness. It was hard on one who had prided herself on her brains!
Matthew returned, driving slowly, a grave expression on his handsome face. Having unhitched his horse he came round to the porch where the flutter of a short skirt vanishing indoors did not escape him. He was deeply angry with the anger of a superior toward an inferior or an elder toward a child. He could not understand Ellen. For the first time in her life she had not been willing to go his way, and she had marred what would otherwise have been a perfect experience.
Hitherto he had not thought much about his father or his father's convictions, his father's neglect of church having been a condition with which he had always been familiar, but now it seemed unnecessary and wrong. Realizing in his new devotion that it was his duty to admonish his careless parent, he prayed for opportunity and strength.
The three Levises ate their dinner silently, the housekeeper sitting with them. She had, seen close at hand, an air of patient endurance under affliction. She had expected, according to custom, that the man of whose house and children she had taken such good care for so many years would marry her, though she had already been married twice and was somewhat older than he. She had even, being hopeful of Dr. Levis, discouraged the advances of a neighboring farmer. The short lives of her two husbands and the oaklike hardness of Levis made her lot a very disappointing one. Having just heard of the marriage of a friend, she was more than usually depressed, a condition which did not escape her master, to whom her mournful disposition and her extraordinary combinations of English and German were sources of deep and silent amusement. He could not always remember her expressions, but Ellen could repeat them at length. "Unsere number iss 1 long and 2 short and sis very hart zu's distinguishe," she would say into the telephone and be perfectly understood by the person at the other end. Or, "I sink it will give rain," or, "Ach, Ellen, what do you make, then!"