There were other things occurring just at this time which served to keep Ellen irritable and sensitive. Her experience in stenography was, throughout, unfortunate and was making her see in almost everything that happened a slight to herself. To Mrs. O'Brien's prolonged amazement, the heads of various firms continued their insulting treatment of Ellen, discharging her on the slightest provocation or no provocation whatever, and never giving the poor girl, so her mother declared, anything like a fair trial. "Now what I would like to know is this:" Mrs. O'Brien would begin in the evening as soon as Jamie, poor man, was quietly settled for his bedtime pipe; "how can they know what Ellen can do or what she can't do, never giving her a decent show? The last six places she's been at they've only kept her a day or two days at most. It's me own opinion they don't want a good stenographer. I believe they're jealous of her! I tell you, Jamie O'Brien, it's fair disgraceful, and if I was a man, which I'm thankful to say I ain't, I'd go down there and give them fellas a piece of my mind!" To Ellen herself, Mrs. O'Brien was, as usual, both sympathetic and voluble. "Don't you mind what them fellas say to you, Ellen dear," she would advise at each fresh disappointment. "You've had as fine a schoolin' as any of them and there'll come a day when they'll all have to acknowledge it. And when they talk to you again about your spelling, you can tell them for me they're mighty smart if they're able to prove what's the right and what's the wrong way to spell a word nowadays. If I was you I wouldn't worry me head one minute about a thrifle like spelling. I'd just go ahead me own way and remember I was a lady and, take me word for it, some of these days you'll hit an office that is an office with fine men at the head of it, able to know good work when they see it and willin' to give credit for it!" Ellen shared to a great extent her mother's belief in her own ability, and she tried to share likewise Mrs. O'Brien's firm conviction that there was a deep-laid plot to keep her down. In her mother's presence it was easy enough to believe this, but Ellen was too quick-witted to deceive herself all the time and, as the days went by and her failure in stenography grew more and more apparent, she began to lose her air of aggressive confidence and to show in a new sullenness of manner the chagrin and the disappointment she was feeling.