# Possession (Bromfield)/Chapter 6

MR. MURDOCK stayed a week longer than he had planned, and before he left he managed to see Ellen not once, but many times. Always May was present, giggling and admiring, though toward the end, under the prodding of a shrewd mother who saw a concealed menace in the situation, she betrayed a slight and refreshing coldness toward her friend. Before he left, Ellen called him Mr. Murdock no longer, but Clarence.
​In the weeks that followed she received from him two post cards, one a colored picture of lower New York photographed from Brooklyn Bridge against the sunset and the other a view of the Reservoir at Forty-Second street which, he wrote, had been demolished a little while before. On them he recalled her promise to let him know when she came to New York. May, however, received a dozen post cards and a half-dozen letters, so his correspondence with Ellen must have signified nothing at all. Certainly it did not excite her deeply.
"Clarence writes me," said May one day, "that you are going to New York. Why didn't you tell me? . . . I should think you'd tell your best friend a thing like that."
And Ellen slipped into a cloud of evasions. "I may have told him that," she replied airily. "I don't know how he could have found out. . . . It was a secret, I haven't mentioned it to any-one." And she made a number of vague excuses, which seemed neither logical nor founded upon fact. It was as if she considered May too stupid to understand such things or thought her too unimportant to consider at all.
"It's funny," said May, "that you'd tell such a thing to a stranger like Clarence. . . ." For a moment the suspicions planted in her complacent mind by an aspiring mother stirred with life and raised their heads. But she succumbed again quickly to the domination of her companion and thrust an arm about Ellen's waist.
"It's only because I'm interested," she said. "I know that you're going to be great and famous some day. . . . We're all going to be proud of you."
At which Ellen sniffed, not without an air of scorn, as if she cared not a fig whether the Town was proud of her or not.
At home, however, May received another warning from her mother. "Mr. Murdock," said the plump Mrs. Seaton, "is not a young man to be passed up lightly. . . . There aren't many like him. . . . He suits your father to a T, and he ​would fit in fine at the factory. Your father needs some one like that to help him out, until Jimmy is big enough to take hold. . . . Don't trust Ellen too far. . . . She's too quiet to be trusted."
At which May only laughed. "Why, Ellen wouldn't think of marrying him," she said, "she won't marry anybody in this town. . . . It isn't likely she'll ever marry . . . at least for a long time. Besides, she doesn't think he's good enough."
Mrs. Seton snorted angrily and put down the Ladies' Home Journal. "Good enough for her. . . ! Who is she to be so choosey? . . . Why, the Tollivers can't pay their bills. . . . They're just out of bankruptcy. . . . Good enough for her. . . ! If she ever gets as fine and upstanding a young man as Mr. Murdock . . . a man so industrious and hardworking and well-behaved, she can thank her stars. . . ." For a moment Mrs. Seton paused to recover her breath, greatly dissipated by this indignant outburst. That Ellen should scorn Mr. Clarence Murdock was not a thing to be borne lightly. Then she continued, "And this talk about going to New York. . . . How's she going to get to New York? Who's to put up the money, I'd like to know? Old Julia Shane, I suppose. . . . It's not likely the old woman would part with a cent even if she could."
It was, in the Seton family, a cherished fiction that Julia Shane was stricken by an overwhelming poverty: it was a fiction that increased the confidence of a fortune founded upon reinforced corsets.
"Julia Shane!" continued the ambitious mother, "Julia Shane! What's she got to be proud about? . . . With a daughter as fast and loose as Lily? . . . I suppose she's proud of living in that filthy old house in the midst of the Flats."
And so the ashes of the feud between the Setons and the Barr-Shane-Tolliver clan, lighted accidentally by the chance appearance of the guiltless and model Mr. Murdock, showed signs of flaming up again after a peace of twenty years.