University of Virginia Library


194

Page 194

21. CHAPTER XXI.

Unusquisque sua noverit ire via.—

Propert. Eleg.25.

O lift your natures up:
Embrace our aims: work out your freedom. Girls,
Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed;
Drink deep until the habits of the slave,
The sins of emptiness, gossip and spite
And slander, die.

The Princess.


WHETHER medicine is a science, or only an empirical
method of getting a living out of the ignorance of the
human race, Ruth found before her first term was over at
the medical school that there were other things she needed
to know quite as much as that which is taught in medical
books, and that she could never satisfy her aspirations without
more general culture.

“Does your doctor know any thing—I don't mean about
medicine, but about things in general, is he a man of information
and good sense?” once asked an old practitioner.
“If he doesn't know any thing but medicine the chance is he
doesn't know that.”

The close application to her special study was beginning
to tell upon Ruth's delicate health also, and the summer
brought with it only weariness and indisposition for any
mental effort.

In this condition of mind and body the quiet of her home
and the unexciting companionship of those about her were
more than ever tiresome.

She followed with more interest Philip's sparkling account


195

Page 195
of his life in the west, and longed for his experiences, and
to know some of those people of a world so different from
hers, who alternately amused and displeased him. He at
least was learning the world, the good and the bad of it, as
must happen to every one who accomplishes anything in it.

But what, Ruth wrote, could a woman do, tied up by custom,
and cast into particular circumstances out of which it
was almost impossible to extricate herself? Philip thought
that he would go some day and extricate Ruth, but he did
not write that, for he had the instinct to know that this was
not the extrication she dreamed of, and that she must find
out by her own experience what her heart really wanted.

Philip was not a philosopher, to be sure, but he had the
old fashioned notion, that whatever a woman's theories of
life might be, she would come round to matrimony, only
give her time. He could indeed recall to mind one woman—
and he never knew a nobler—whose whole soul was devoted
and who believed that her life was consecrated to a certain
benevolent project in singleness of life, who yielded to the
touch of matrimony, as an icicle yields to a sunbeam.

Neither at home nor elsewhere did Ruth utter any complaint,
or admit any weariness or doubt of her ability to pursue
the path she had marked out for herself. But her mother
saw clearly enough her struggle with infirmity, and was not
deceived by either her gaiety or by the cheerful composure
which she carried into all the ordinary duties that fell to her.
She saw plainly enough that Ruth needed an entire change
of scene and of occupation, and perhaps she believed that
such a change, with the knowledge of the world it would
bring, would divert Ruth from a course for which she felt
she was physically entirely unfitted.

It therefore suited the wishes of all concerned, when autumn
came, that Ruth should go away to school. She selected a
large New England Seminary, of which she had often heard
Philip speak, which was attended by both sexes and offered
almost collegiate advantages of education. Thither she went
in September, and began for the second time in the year a
life new to her.


196

Page 196

[ILLUSTRATION]

RESIDENCE OF SQUIRE MONTAGUE.

[Description: 499EAF. Page 196. In-line image of a large plantation house, with two people walking up the tree-lined pathway.]

The Seminary was the chief feature of Fallkill, a village
of two to three thousand inhabitants. It was a prosperous
school, with three hundred students, a large corps of teachers,
men and women, and with a venerable rusty row of academic
buildings on the shaded square of the town. The students
lodged and boarded in private families in the place, and so it
came about that while the school did a great deal to support the
town, the town gave the students society and the sweet influences
of home life. It is at least respectful to say that the
influences of home life are sweet.

Ruth's home, by the intervention of Philip, was in a family—one
of the rare exceptions in life or in fiction—that had
never known better days. The Montagues, it is perhaps well
to say, had intended to come over in the Mayflower, but were
detained at Delft Haven by the illness of a child. They came
over to Massachusetts Bay in another vessel, and thus escaped
the onus of that brevet nobility under which the successors
of the Mayflower Pilgrims have descended. Having no
factitious weight of dignity to carry, the Montagues steadily
improved their condition from the day they landed, and they
were never more vigorous or prosperous than at the date of
this narrative. With character compacted by the rigid Puritan
discipline of more than two centuries, they had retained
its strength and purity and thrown off its narrowness, and
were now blossoming under
the generous modern
influences. Squire Oliver
Montague, a lawyer
who had retired from the
practice of his profession
except in rare cases,
dwelt in a square old
fashioned New England
mansion a quarter of a
mile away from the green. It was called a mansion because
it stood alone with ample fields about it, and had an avenue
of trees leading to it from the road, and on the west commanded
a view of a pretty little lake with gentle slopes and nodding


197

Page 197
[ILLUSTRATION]

INSIDE THE MANSION.

[Description: 499EAF. Page 197. In-line image of a woman standing alone in a fancy parlor reading a piece of paper.]
groves. But it was just a plain, roomy house, capable of
extending to many guests an unpretending hospitality.

The family consisted of the Squire and his wife, a son and
a daughter married and not at home, a son in college at Cambridge,
another son at the Seminary, and a daughter Alice,
who was a year or more older than Ruth. Having only
riches enough to be able to gratify reasonable desires, and
yet make their gratifications always a novelty and a pleasure,
the family occupied that just mean in life which is so rarely
attained, and still more rarely enjoyed without discontent.

If Ruth did not find so much luxury in the house as in her
own home, there were evidences of culture, of intellectual
activity and of a zest in the affairs of all the world, which
greatly impressed her. Every room had its book-cases or
book-shelves, and was
more or less a library;
upon every table was liable
to be a litter of new
books, fresh periodicals and
daily newspapers. There
were plants in the sunny
windows and some choice
engravings on the walls,
with bits of color in oil or
water-colors; the piano
was sure to be open and
strewn with music; and there were photographs and little
souvenirs here and there of foreign travel. An absence
of any “what-nots” in the corners with rows of cheerful
shells, and Hindoo gods, and Chinese idols, and nests of useless
boxes of lacquered wood, might be taken as denoting
a languidness in the family concerning foreign
missions, but perhaps unjustly.

At any rate the life of the world flowed freely into this
hospitable house, and there was always so much talk there of
the news of the day, of the new books and of authors, of
Boston radicalism and New York civilization, and the virtue


198

Page 198
of Congress, that small gossip stood a very poor chance

All this was in many ways so new to Ruth that she seemed
to have passed into another world, in which she experienced a
freedom and a mental exhilaration unknown to her before.
Under this influence she entered upon her studies with keen
enjoyment, finding for a time all the relaxation she needed,
in the charming social life at the Montague house.

It is strange, she wrote to Philip, in one of her occasional
letters, that you never told me more about this delightful
family, and scarcely mentioned Alice who is the life of it,
just the noblest girl, unselfish, knows how to do so many
things, with lots of talent, with a dry humor, and an odd way
of looking at things, and yet quiet and even serious often—
one of your “capable” New England girls. We shall be
great friends. It had never occurred to Philip that there was
any thing extraordinary about the family that needed mention.
He knew dozens of girls like Alice, he thought to himself,
but only one like Ruth.

Good friends the two girls were from the beginning.
Ruth was a study to Alice, the product of a culture entirely
foreign to her experience, so much a child in some things,
so much a woman in others; and Ruth in turn, it must be
confessed, probing Alice sometimes with her serious grey
eyes, wondered what her object in life was, and whether she
had any purpose beyond living as she now saw her. For
she could scarcely conceive of a life that should not be devoted
to the accomplishment of some definite work, and she
had no doubt that in her own case everything else would
yield to the professional career she had marked out.

“So you know Philip Sterling,” said Ruth one day as the
girls sat at their sewing. Ruth never embroidered, and
never sewed when she could avoid it. Bless her.

“Oh yes, we are old friends. Philip used to come to
Fallkill often while he was in college. He was once rusticated
here for a term.”

“Rusticated?”


199

Page 199

“Suspended for some College scrape. He was a great
favorite here. Father and he were famous friends. Father
said that Philip had no end of nonsense in him and was
always blundering into something, but he was a royal good
fellow and would come out all right.”

“Did you think he was fickle?”

“Why, I never thought whether he was or not,” replied
Alice looking up. “I suppore he was always in love with
some girl or another, as college boys are. He used to make
me his confidant now and then, and be terribly in the
dumps.”

“Why did he come to you?” pursued Ruth you were
younger than he.”

“I'm sure I don't know. He was at our house a good deal.
Once at a picnic by the lake, at the risk of his own life, he
saved sister Millie from drowning, and we all liked to have
him here. Perhaps he thought as he had saved one sister,
the other ought to help him when he was in trouble. I don't
know.”

The fact was that Alice was a person who invited confidences,
because she never betrayed them, and gave abundant
sympathy in return. There are persons, whom we all know,
to whom human confidences, troubles and heart-aches flow as
naturally as streams to a placid lake.

This is not a history of Fallkill, nor of the Montague family,
worthy as both are of that honor, and this narrative cannot
be diverted into long loitering with them. If the reader
visits the village to-day, he will doubtless be pointed out the
Montague dwelling, where Ruth lived, the cross-lots path she
traversed to the Seminary, and the venerable chapel with its
cracked bell.

In the little society of the place, the Quaker girl was a
favorite, and no considerable social gathering or pleasure party
was thought complete without her. There was something in
this seemingly transparent and yet deep character, in her
childlike gaiety and enjoyment of the society about her, and


200

Page 200
[ILLUSTRATION]

RUTH DISSIPATING.

[Description: 499EAF. Page 200. In-line image of a group of people dancing in a gazebo next to a lake.]
in her not seldom absorption in herself, that would have
made her long remembered there if no events had subsequently
occurred to recall her to mind.

To the surprise of Alice, Ruth took to the small gaieties of
the village with a zest of enjoyment that seemed foreign to
one who had devoted her life to a serious profession from the
highest motives. Alice liked society well enough, she thought,
but there was nothing exciting in that of Fallkill, nor anything
novel in the attentions of the well-bred young gentlemen
one met in it. It must have worn a different aspect to
Ruth, for she entered into its pleasures at first with curiosity,
and then with interest and finally with a kind of staid
abandon that no one would have deemed possible for her.
Parties, picnics, rowing-matches, moonlight strolls, nutting-expeditions
in the October
woods,—Alice declared that
it was a whirl of dissipation.
The fondness of Ruth, which was scarcely disguised,
for the company of agreeable young fellows, who talked
nothings, gave Alice opportunity for no end of banter.

“Do you look upon them as `subjects,' dear?” she would
ask.

And Ruth laughed her merriest laugh, and then looked
sober again. Perhaps she was thinking, after all, whether
she knew herself.


201

Page 201

[ILLUSTRATION] [Description: 499EAF. Page 201. Tail-piece image of two men and women together talking. One man is bowing]

If you should rear a duck in the heart of the Sahara, no
doubt it would swim if you brought it to the Nile.

Surely no one would have predicted when Ruth left Philadelphia
that she would become absorbed to this extent, and
so happy, in a life so unlike that she thought she desired.
But no one can tell how a woman will act under any circumstances.
The reason novelists nearly always fail in depicting
women when they make them act, is that they let them do
what they have observed some woman has done at sometime
or another. And that is where they make a mistake; for a
woman will never do again what has been done before. It is
this uncertainty that causes women, considered as materials
for fiction, to be so interesting to themselves and to others.

As the fall went on and the winter, Ruth did not distinguish
herself greatly at the Fallkill Seminary as a student, a
fact that apparently gave her no anxiety, and did not diminish
her enjoyment of a new sort of power which had awakened
within her.