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Show 293 an asceticism founded on the notion that the more pain and suffering in this life, the brighter one's prospects for a future life of unfathomable joy. Except for subtle nuances in Ellis's letters to Nellie and the two brief accounts Bardella provided of her father's life, there is no strong clue to support our fear that their common dream did lose its luster. Yet there is hope that their tacit turning away here from a marital relationship which once held such prospects of realizable ecstasy, will not constitute relinquishment-but merely postponement- of the vision once shared by Ellis Reynolds and Milford Bard Shipp, the man of her maidenly dreams. Margaret went to her grave with a soul-filling, active love. Ellis, endowed from her youth with a high passion which life's harsh realities were never able to support, probably died famished for the very thing she'd made her whole life's object. In her brief, charitable comments on Milford's passing, following, as they do, immediately after her testimony of eternal marriage, she almost seems to be saying, as B. H. Roberts did, "Thank goodness for the eternities." Perhaps by now she and Milford are in a place that is free from the mortal limitations to true understanding. Perhaps they are together in a sunlit land where economic strictures cannot so cruelly warp and twist and strangle that which is precious and unique. Perhaps they are holding hands from time to time and seeing |