“When she ((Ellen)) shopped (there were twenty stores in Jefferson now)she unbent without even getting out of the carriage, gracious and assures and talking the most complete nonsense, voluble, speaking her bring set meaningless phrases out of the part which she had written for herself, of the duchess peripatetic with property soups and medicines among a soilless and uncompelled peasantry - a woman who, if she had the fortitude to bear sorrow and trouble, might have rise to actual stardom in the role of the matriarch arbitrating from the fireside corner of a crone the pride and destiny of her family, instead of turning at the last to the youngest member of it and asking her to protect the others.”