Adelle's high-school career was interrupted in January, just as she had turned fifteen, by her aunt's sickness. For the first time in forty years, as the widow told the doctor, she had taken to her bed. "Time to make up for all the good loafing you have missed," the young doctor joked cheaply in reply, not realizing the hardship of invalidism, with a houseful of roomers, in a small back bedroom near enough to the center of activities for the sick woman to know all that happened without having the strength to interfere. It was only the grippe, the doctor said, advising rest, care, and food. It would be a matter of a week or two, and Adelle was doing her best to take her aunt's place in the house and also nurse her aunt. But Mrs. Clark never left her bed until she was carried to the cemetery to be laid beside the Veteran in the already crowded lot. The grippe proved to be a convenient name to conceal a general breaking-up, due to years of wearing, ceaseless woman's toil without hope, in the disintegrating Clark atmosphere that ate like an acid into the consciousness even of plain Ellen Trigg, with her humble expectations from life.
Adelle was much moved by the death of her aunt, the last remaining relative that she knew of, though the few people who saw her at this time thought she "took it remarkably well." They interpreted her expressionless passivity to a lack of feeling. As a matter of fact, she had been much more attached to her aunt than to any one she had ever known. The plain woman, who had no pretensions and did her work uncomplainingly because it was useless to complain, had inspired the girl with respect and given her what little character she had. Ellen Clark was a stoic, unconsciously, and she had taught Adelle the wisdom of the stoic's creed. The girl realized fully now that she was alone in life, alone spiritually as well as physically, and though she did not drop tears as she came back to the empty Church Street house from the cemetery,--for that was not the thing to do now: it was to get back as soon as possible and set the house to rights as her aunt would have done so that the roomers should not be put out any further,--her heart was heavy, nevertheless, and she may even have wondered sadly what was to become of her.