# Possession (Bromfield)/Chapter 48

ON the very same night in her weathered house sheltered by lilacs and syringas in the Town Miss Ogilvie, trembling and fluttering like a canary set free and preening itself in the sun, packed her trunk for the trip to the East. Any one looking on might have believed her, save for the wrinkled rosy cheeks and the slight spare figure, a young girl on the eve of her first party. After all, it was an event . . . the first trip she had made to the East since the Seventies when she had sailed as a girl for Munich. And she was going East to hear Ellen Tolliver play . . . Ellen who had been a chit of a girl when she had last seen her, Ellen who was now Lilli Barr, whose name and picture appeared everywhere in the papers, Ellen who had hid​den on the night she fled the Town in the nest-like parlor of this very house.
Miss Ogilvie, packing her best taffeta with its corals and cameos to wear at the concert, indulged in an orgy of memories . . . memories that went back to the years before Ellen was born, to the days in Munich when for a delirious week, until the heavy hand of her father intervened, she had fancied she would become a great musician and play in public.
Pausing beside the old tin-bound trunk, she thought, "No, I never could have done it. I was too much a coward. But Ellen has . . . Ellen has. . . . And to think that I advised her to do it, that I told her to go ahead."
In the long span of a gentle life in which there had been no heights and no valleys, this occasion eclipsed all else . . . even the day she had herself sailed on the black paquebot for Europe.
"It happens like that . . . in the most unexpected places, in villages, in towns. . . . Why, even in a dirty mill town like this."
It all came back to her now, all the conversation between herself and Ellen on that last day when, weeping, she said to the girl, "I no longer count for anything. You are beyond me. Who am I to instruct you?"
And she remembered too with a sudden warmth the old bond between them, the hatred of this awful, sooty Town . . . a desert from which Ellen had boldly escaped, which Miss Ogilvie had accepted, hiding always in her heart her loathing of the place.
"And to think that she remembered me . . . a poor, insignificant old woman like me! To think that she even paid my way!"
For Miss Ogilvie could not have come otherwise. As the years passed she had grown poorer and poorer in her house behind the trees.
Her conscience pricked the old lady. "I wonder," she thought, sitting on the edge of her chair before the old trunk. "I wonder if I should confess to Hattie Tolliver that it was I who helped them to escape. It would be more honest, since I am going to stay with her."
​And then she grew worried for fear Ellen might be ashamed of her in her old-fashioned taffeta with coral and cameo pins. Ellen had been living in Paris with Lily Shane; she would know all about the latest thing in clothes. And to convince herself that the dress was not too bad, she put it on and pinning fast the coral and cameos, stood before her glass, frizzing her hair and pulling the dress this way and that.
In the midst of these preparations, she was interrupted by the distant jangle of the bell and the sound caused her to blush and start as if she, an old dried-up woman, had been caught by an intruder coquetting before her mirror.
She knew who was at the door. It was Eva Barr and May Biggs come to send messages to Ellen, for they too shared a little her excitement. They would talk, the three of them, about Ellen as they remembered her until long after midnight; for all three hoped that Ellen might be induced to play in the Town, especially since there was such a fine new auditorium. They too had claims upon her, claims of friendship and blood and old associations.