startling piece of news, I had read that Breckenridge Sewall was reported engaged to his cousin, Miss Gale somebody or other, a débutante of last season.
Ruth's news was an awful shock to me. I knew without being told how jubilant Edith would be, how helpless Alec in the face of what seemed to both the women of his household such a brilliant victory. I didn't know what to do. It didn't seem as if I could stand by and watch my own sister marry the kind of man Will said that Breck Sewall was. I lay awake a long while that night after Ruth's arrival at our house, wondering what under heaven I, whose ideas on life my sister considered so provincial—what there was that I might do to swerve her from her purpose.
I could hope for no help from Will. Ruth had thrown him utterly out of sympathy with her. He washed his hands of the whole affair; he told me so that night when we came upstairs to bed, and I knew by his manner to my sister the next morning at breakfast, courteous enough though it was, in what contempt he held her. I told Will I couldn't send Ruth back to Hilton, and, as distasteful as I knew Breck Sewall's coming to our door would be to him, I hoped he would let me keep Ruth with me as long as she would stay. I didn't have any plan, any deep-laid scheme. It simply seemed to me that it must have been an act of heaven that Ruth had been sent to me during such a critical period in her history, and I didn't want to fly in the face of Providence.
I began by being just as nice and kind to her as I knew how. I didn't offer one word of opposition; I didn't advise; I didn't criticise; I appeared even to
