Personal: Object Matrimony

by Margaret Cameron

 

PERSONAL: OBJECT MATRIMONY

BY MARGARET CAMERON

BEING, of course, a properly-brought-up and irreproachable person yourself, you may find it difficult to believe that a really nice girl would do what Ruth Adams did—unless you happen to have known Santa Barbara before it became the happy hunting-ground of the busy rich; before tennis and golf and polo and afternoon tea had been imported, and when automobiles, flying-machines, auction bridge, and country clubs were unknown.

It began one rainy afternoon, early in January—one of those days of dark, dank, penetrating chill that only a semi-tropical climate can successfully produce—when Ruth's uncle, Theodore Royce, discovered her huddled in a big chair beside a hissing, smoking fire of imperfectly seasoned eucalyptus wood, intently studying a newspaper.

Royce was a bachelor, under forty, and it was partly because he lived in San Francisco and could visit her frequently that his mother had consented to follow her physician's advice and spend the winter in southern California. Ruth, who had looked forward to a gay season in New York, had been sent west with her grandmother on the eve of her expected début, and between her and her humorous young uncle, whom she had not seen before for several years, there had grown a strong friendship.

When she heard his step behind her she folded her paper quickly, but not before he saw that the column absorbing her attention was among the classified advertisements.

"Looking for congenial employment?" he asked. "Or a new cook? Or a baby to adopt? Or what?"

"'What,' I guess," she returned, coloring slightly. "Anything to break the monotony. I am slowly but surely ossifying in this place!" Then, with a roguish upward glance, "Uncle Ted, did you ever answer a 'Personal'?"

"Certainly not!" A dutiful avuncular severity colored his tone, but he looked amused, and following a reckless impulse she flung her challenge:

"Well, I'm going to!"

"Ruth!" This time the severity was not forced.

"Oh, I know! But I'm perfectly desperate! I want to do something wicked!"

The twinkle came back to his eye, but he said, dryly, "I've heard that the wicked fall into mischief, but this seems to be less a matter of morality than of taste, doesn't it?"

She flushed at that, but insisted, obstinately: "I don't care! It may be vulgar, but I've got to do something! It would be lots more fun, though, if you'd help. Won't you? Oh, wait!" Behind the refusal in his face she saw all the Royce traditions massing themselves. "It isn't that I really want to know anybody like that, you know ... and it won't do a bit of harm ... it won't hurt me, nor anybody else, as long as the family doesn't know. Of course, you can go and tell them—but you won't! Not after I've trusted you! And unless something exciting happens pretty soon I shall go crazy! I'm losing my mind!"

"Bad as that?" He pulled up a chair and sat near her, regarding her with affectionate concern.

In those days not even a locomotive's whistle was heard in that languid old town, and the thin stream of visitors came by unpleasant little steamers over seas often choppy, or by rocking red stages over mountain roads choppy at best. There were no pavements and few sidewalks, and one diminutive, ramshackle street-car ambled unpunctually through State Street, from the Arlington to the wharf and back again. Only the clatter of galloping hoofs or the sound of bells—the booming town clock, the harsh clangor from the parish church, or peals from the distant Mission—broke the constant droning of waves on the beach, more audible then than now because trees and shrubberies were scarcer. Invalids and their families came and went, and to most of them the many tile-roofed adobe buildings, the unfamiliar foliage, the gardens brimming with bloom after the rains, the brown-skinned, voluble Mexicans, with their burros and bronchos, their lariats and huge, spiked spurs, the Chinese house-boys and coolies, and the frocked and sandaled Franciscan friars, who still came down now and then to the town, held perpetual exotic charm. But youth and energy soon wearied of the drowsy quiet, and sometimes broke bounds in desperation.

So Royce regarded his niece with quizzical comprehension, repeating: "Bad as that? H'm! I suppose it isn't very gay for you here. Still—we'll have to find some less desperate remedy than answering Personals! You can't do that, you know."

"What may I do, then?"

"Well, we'll see. I'm going to stay two weeks this time, and when it stops raining we'll get some horses—"

"And ride! When it stops raining! Uncle Ted, do you realize that it has rained all the time for nine solid days? Of course, I like to ride, but I know every stone in every road for miles around! And I've sat on the beach and counted the sad sea waves until I shriek at the sight of them!"

"You've been to some hops, haven't you?" Thus were informal dances designated in those far days.

"Three—in eleven weeks! It wouldn't be so bad if we were at one of the hotels, where we could see people—even if they are all decrepit and half of them invalids! But you know how grandmother feels about hotels. So here we are, marooned in this horrid little house, with weird furniture and a smoky fireplace and no furnace! I do the marketing, and talk Pidgin-English to Fong, and read Emerson and Carlyle and Guizot to grandmother, and huddle in woolly shawls like an old woman to keep from congealing where I sit! When the sun shines grandmother complains of the glare, and when it's foggy she complains of the gloom, and when it rains she goes to bed to keep warm. And she thinks I'm shockingly modern and unwomanly because I'm not perfectly happy keeping a fusty little house, and reading fusty old books to her, and driving her about in a fusty old phaëton, with horseback riding and letters, and once in a while a call by way of amusement. Once a week we play whist with the doctor and his wife—both sixty if they're a minute! Grandmother says that in her day young girls—"

Royce checked the flood with uplifted hand as he said, gently, "She's getting old, Ruth, and she's not well."

"Oh, I know! It isn't that. I'm glad to do things for her, but ... I don't believe grandmother ever was young! She couldn't forget all about it!"

"You know some young people here, don't you?"

"Yes. Sometimes I go out with them or they come here. I like them. But there's nothing to do but ride, or drive, or sometimes dance—and grandmother doesn't like me to go to the dances, because she doesn't approve of what she calls 'the Western lack of restraint.' She's afraid evil communications will corrupt my beautiful Royce-Adams manners! Uncle Teddy, I'd sell my immortal soul for a ticket to the theater at home!"

"H'm," said Royce, watching her.

"When you're here it isn't so bad. You're the one bright spot in the whole landscape! But if I don't have some fun pretty soon—something I don't know all about before it happens ... something exciting..." She paused tragically, and Royce continued to watch her with thoughtful eyes, which presently began to twinkle.

"And you think answering a Personal will supply the missing spice of life, do you?" he asked, finally.

"It will help, anyway," was her energetic reply. "Uncle Teddy, will you? Some of them are so funny! Read that!"

She pulled the folded paper from behind her and thrust it into his hand. He read the item she indicated, shaking his head, and ran through the column dubiously.

"No. They won't do," he said. "This thing is altogether irregular, anyhow, but if we do undertake it, let's at least pick out something interesting."

"Oh, Uncle Teddy! You are the dearest!"

"I'm probably a fool. Mind you, I don't approve of this at all, but... I was young myself once, not so long ago." He paused for her smile, and then grinned as he saw how far from young thirty-eight seemed to nineteen. "Well, anyway, I want you to promise me two things. First, that you'll let me pick out the Personal you answer. Second, that you'll confine your cacoethes scribendi to that one."

"I promise. Cross my heart!"

"Good! Now, there are several reasons why it isn't advisable to answer anything in a San Francisco paper"—he flipped the sheet he held—"one of them being that the fellow might take it into his head to come down here and look you up."

"Oh, he wouldn't! How awful!"

"He might. We'd better find one at a safe distance. So you hold your horses, and I'll watch the Eastern papers at the hotels and the club, and when we find something that sounds at least intelligent we'll answer it." Whereupon she rapturously hugged him, declaring that it was heaps more fun to do things with somebody else, if only that somebody understood.

Then came days of eager waiting. Every night when Royce came in before dinner Ruth looked at him and he shook his head. Sometimes he brought the papers, and when Mrs. Royce had gone to bed the conspirators read the Personal columns together, debating the attractions of this or that advertisement. But in the end he always decided against them. There came a night, however, when he met her glance with a slight nod, and his eyes danced. To the girl the evening seemed interminable, but eventually Mrs. Royce left them, and when they heard her door close Ruth whispered, "Now!" Laughing, he went to his overcoat in the hall, returning with a paper.

"There you are," he said, handing it to her. "That one will do."

Ruth read the item he had marked:

A Young Man, of good family, college graduate, recently returned from abroad, stranger in New York, would like to correspond with a young lady of similar education and tastes. Object, matrimony. No triflers. Address P. P., Box 57, New York Scroll.

"Oh, no fair!" she laughed. "He's a trifler himself!"

"Well, we live in a glass house, so far as that's concerned. Anyway, he sounds promising, and if he's stupid we'll soon find it out and drop him."

Together, with much laughter, they drafted their letter, which they made at once reserved and intriguing, thoughtful and humorous. When it was finished to their satisfaction Ruth suddenly looked up, wide-eyed, asking:

"How on earth am I going to sign it?"

"You're going to sign your own name," her uncle returned, decisively. "Oh yes, you are! In a little place like this, where everybody is known, and you're likely to dance with the post-master's assistant at the next hop, you're not going to receive letters under an assumed name through the general delivery. If you're ashamed of this, don't do it. If you do it, face the music and see it through."

"Even to the extent of letting the gentleman achieve his 'object?'" she asked, mischievously. But she signed the letter and gave it to him to post, lamenting that she must wait nearly three weeks for a reply—in those days transcontinental trains were slow—and that Royce would not be there when it arrived.

He said he might, however, as he expected to go to Los Angeles within a few days, and would return by sea, if possible, stopping over in Santa Barbara on his way north again. The next night he departed for San Francisco, where events justified his plans, and something less than three weeks later he found himself again approaching Santa Barbara.

As his steamer was slowly warped alongside the wharf he caught sight of Ruth on the outskirts of the waiting crowd, eagerly waving a letter and motioning to him to hurry ashore.

"It's come!" she cried, breathlessly, as she led the way to a carriage. "You're just in time! It came last night. Such a letter, Uncle Ted! Such a delight of a letter! He's a Harvard man, and his name's Prescott Patterson, and he's been abroad for three years, and— ... Oh yes, grandmother's pretty well, thank you.... Yes, everything's all right at home. There!" She thrust the letter into his hands as soon as he had seated himself beside her. "Read it and see for yourself! Don't you like his hand?"

"It's legible," he admitted, whimsically.

"Legible! It's beautiful! So strong and symmetrical, and ... well-bred. Don't you think it shows character?"

"Look here, Ruth, you're not going to lose your head over this thing?" he asked, eying her somewhat apprehensively. "It's just a game. You'll never meet this fellow, you know."

"Oh no!" She laughed at his evident misgiving. "That would never do! It's just a game ... but it's so deliciously unexpected. I was afraid to open it for fear he'd be banal and horrid, but—well, you just read it! I'll have to scramble to keep up my end! That's why it's such fun!"

It was a delightful letter, frank, manly, and appreciative in tone. It indicated good taste and a warm sense of humor on the part of the writer—humor that occasionally flashed into wit. Royce perused it chuckling, and said, as he handed it back to her:

"Yes, my child, you've got your work cut out for you, to hold your own with that young man. That's a good letter."

"I wish he wasn't so far away! It takes so long to get an answer."

But evidently Prescott Patterson's appetite for this correspondence was no less keen than her own, for a few days later came a book, with a note asking her opinion of it, and a week after that a box of candy, with his engraved card, each of which she acknowledged. Meanwhile, she had answered his letter immediately, without Royce's assistance, although she submitted it to him before posting it, and she also showed him her letter about the book and her gay note of thanks for the candy. To these Patterson replied at once, and thus was inaugurated a brisk correspondence, with one or more letters always traveling between them, all of which Ruth gleefully shared with Royce whenever he was in Santa Barbara.

Illustration: "OH, NO FAIR!" SHE LAUGHED. "HE'S A TRIFLER HIMSELF!"

Every letter brought fresh revelation. The two in the West learned that the one in the East liked hazel eyes (Ruth's eyes were hazel) and brown hair (Ruth's hair was a golden bronze). He liked all outdoor sports, but cared little for formal society; he was fond of music, but no connoisseur. Occasionally he sent her volumes of new verse and fiction, and some brilliant essays by a writer little known in this country, one Robert Louis Stevenson, all accompanied by penetrating comment, lightly phrased. He liked Tennyson and Marcus Aurelius and Thackeray, and disliked Dickens. He felt at home in London and a stranger in Paris, admired Rome and loved Florence, enjoyed Holland and hated Germany. Sometimes he told her incidentally of adventures in quaint, out-of-the-way places, which he pictured vividly in few words. In these and many other ways he wrote himself upon the page, and Ruth's letters were equally self-revealing.

There could be no question that she had found again the spice of life, even the long, dull days with her grandmother being full-flavored with expectancy. By the end of February, however, Royce began to be aware that the fragments of Patterson's letters now read to him were becoming more and more fragmentary, and he was uneasily conscious of a soft new glow about Ruth, but could not decide whether it was produced by the letters or was merely the effect upon youth of approaching spring. The rains had not wholly ceased, but between downpours there were days of warm sunshine. Yellow blossoms were breaking forth on the acacia-trees and waxy magnolia buds were opening, while in the gardens datura, heliotrope, jasmine, honeysuckle, and mignonette were coming more fully into flower, and over the green hills here and there a faint golden haze of mustard began to spread, all this fragrance mingling with the salt air from the sea. One breathed a subtle intoxication, and Ruth was flowering with the other young things. Was it spring? Was it youth? Was it ... What was it?

"Look here, Ruth," he said, bluntly, one night, "is that fellow Patterson making love to you?"

"No."

The denial was prompt and she met his glance frankly, but ... was her flush an answer to the more direct question he could not ask?

"Sure?"

"You may read all his letters, if you want to."

"I don't want to read his letters. But neither do I want you... You see, dear, this whole affair is reprehensible. I ought never to have let you do it, but ... well ... I thought you needed amusement. And I'm responsible for it.

"Are you afraid to be responsible for it now?" she asked, straightly.

"Not if you keep it the game we agreed it was to be. If it gets to be more than that, I shall be very sorry indeed. We agreed, you remember, that it was to be only a game, and that you could never meet him," he insisted.

"Y-yes, but—that was before we knew anything about him."

"You know nothing about him now except what he has told you himself, and you can't meet him, Ruth. It won't do." He spoke gently, but firmly.

"I don't see why not, if he's properly introduced. We must know somebody who knows him, and when I get home—⁠ I don't see why not."

"At any rate, you're not at home now, and I'm responsible for this situation. And unless you play fair with me and keep it a game—think of it as a game, to be dropped when you leave here—don't you see the position you'll put us both in with the family?"

"I'll play fair," she said, slowly. "But it's more than a game now, Uncle Ted. It's a friendship ... and you say yourself he's a gentleman ... and I don't see why I can't meet him—sometime."

He hesitated a moment, as if about to say something more, but apparently thought better of it and turned away.

That evening the door-bell rang, and Royce himself went to the door, to find an extremely presentable young man on the step.

"How do you do, Mr. Royce?" Ruth heard a pleasant voice say. "Don't you remember me? I'm Jack Bainbridge."

Royce gasped audibly before he exclaimed: "Jack! Come in! What in the name of all the gods brings you here?"

"You," was the laughing reply. "I went to your office in San Francisco and they said you were down here, so I just moseyed along after you."

"When did you get here? And how?"

"By stage, just before dinner."

"But—I had a letter from Kate a day or so ago and she didn't tell me you were coming."

"She didn't know it. I had to come out to Denver about some business for the estate, and ... well, I just couldn't resist coming the rest of the way to see the coast—and you. So I decided to take you by surprise."

"You succeeded! Jove, I'm glad to see you!"

"Sure you are?"

"Dead sure!"

Both men were laughing when Royce brought his guest into the room where his mother and Ruth were sitting and presented him as an old friend. Later in the evening Mrs. Royce chose a moment when Ruth and Bainbridge were talking together to remark, with an observant eye upon her son:

"I don't remember Mr. Bainbridge's family, Theodore."

"Probably you never met them, Mother."

"You seem to know his sister very well."

"I have known her well for years. You'd like her. I met her in Boston, but the family lived in Philadelphia, when they were not in Washington or abroad."

"Ah, Philadelphia. Frederick Bainbridge had a brother in Philadelphia, I remember."

"Jack's father."

"An excellent family." Her vigilance relaxed a little. "And his mother?"

"Was born a Cabot." Mrs. Royce nodded contentedly, her caste prejudice satisfied, and her son laughed. "They're conservative and exclusive enough to satisfy even you, Mother."

"And the sister—whom you call Kate. Whom did she marry?"

"Kate has never married." That this was by no choice of his he found irrelevant. "Be nice to Jack, will you, Mother? He's a splendid chap. I haven't seen him before since he left college, but I know all about him. And Ruth needs a good time."

"Ruth has quite as much pleasure as is good for a girl," she began, firmly, but at that moment Bainbridge turned to her with just the admixture of deference and interest that she regarded as her due, and she smiled benignly upon him.

Before Royce walked back to his hotel with him the young man had accepted an invitation to dine with the women the following evening, and Ruth had promised to ride with him in the morning.

Having urged Bainbridge to stay as long as possible in Santa Barbara, the elder man departed at dawn for San Francisco, cheered by the conviction that relief had come to a difficult situation. He argued that however Ruth's youthful fancy might have turned, in her isolation and loneliness, to a man she had never seen—around whose personality, as indicated in the letters, she had undoubtedly built up a romantic ideal of sublimated masculine perfections—a few days of actual association with so attractive a man as young Bainbridge would dispel so vague a dream. "A boy in the flesh is worth two on a page," he told himself, the more comfortably because he was satisfied that, should the boy in the flesh replace the one on the page in Ruth's dreams, no more suitable marriage could be desired for her.

Meanwhile, as his steamer wallowed slowly northward, his niece and Bainbridge galloped over the hard, wet sands to a break in the cliffs near Ortega Hill and returned by the road, chatting blithely. They discovered that he had met during the winter several débutantes who were her friends, and, while disclaiming any desire to be regarded as "a society man," he told her of dinners and plays, skating parties and dances, of which these friends had earlier written her.

"To think that you were there, and that I might have been!" she cried. "It makes me feel like Rip van Winkle! You say Julie van Brunt's cousin was a classmate of yours. What was your college?"

"Harvard."

"Oh ... was it?"

Her hesitation instantly caught his attention and he turned sharply toward her. "Don't tell me you're for the blue!"

"Is that the only alternative?" she laughed, rallying. "What was your class?"

When he told her she knew that he and Patterson had been classmates, too, but dared not ask if they were friends, since she could not explain how she knew the other man. For the moment it gave her an uncomfortable furtive feeling where before had been only the sense of a delightful secret shared with her uncle. To be unable to speak of one man to another was to Ruth a new sensation, and not a pleasant one. But to be riding in the scented sunshine with some one near her own age, who knew her friends and shared her interests and talked of places she had always known, savored of rapture. The morning was touched with magic.

Passing the post-office, they stopped for the mail, and when she found a thick letter from Patterson the disagreeable furtive feeling returned, to be banished only when she read the letter itself after luncheon—a letter so frank, so humorous, so full of a vigorous and charming personality that a thought of guilt in connection with it seemed absurd. Even her new resentment that she must steal away alone before daring to read it lost its poignancy in the atmosphere of that letter, and there was balm in the thought that she had explained to Patterson her reasons for entering upon such a correspondence, the unyielding conventionality of her family, and her uncle's share in the proceeding. For the first time, however, she failed to answer one of these letters on the day it was received. Her grandmother required her attention all the afternoon, and in the evening Bainbridge dined with them, deepening the favorable impression he had made upon Mrs. Royce the night before.

At dinner the talk turned upon travel, and the young man mentioned that he had spent the greater part of the time since his graduation traveling in Europe with friends. Mrs. Royce ascertained that he had felt at home in London from the first moment, but that Paris, while more stimulating in many ways, had seemed less his own. Rome, naturally, presented a tremendous historical appeal, he said, but living in Rome would be like living with Minerva, Mnemosyne, and Atropos rolled into one—rather overpowering at breakfast. Mrs. Royce smiled approvingly at the classical allusion.

"Now Florence," he went on, "notwithstanding her tragedies, has charm, like a lovely woman. But Rome ... well, Rome's rather too tremendous. Don't you think so, Mrs. Royce?" Which gave the lady an opportunity to intimate tactfully that the impressions of youth were always interesting when modestly expressed, though maturity and experience often corrected them.

"Did you go to Germany ... or Holland?" Ruth asked, in a casual tone.

"Both," he replied. This, it must be remembered, was more than thirty-five years ago, before Europe had become an American highway. "Holland is delightful. Rather damp, of course, but quaint—picturesque. We liked it. But Germany ... this may be a superficial impression"—he smiled disarmingly at Mrs. Royce—"and I may get over it when I grow up, though I think I'll be dead first... Germany I don't like."

"Which do you like the better, Dickens or Thackeray?" Ruth demanded, suddenly, fixing him with wide, accusing eyes.

"Dickens," he calmly returned, though his lips twitched. "Thackeray's too cynical for me. Why?"

"I just wondered."

"Is that a touchstone with you?" he asked, laughing. "Have I said the wrong thing? Which do you like better?"

"Thackeray," said Ruth. Then, carefully, she took a long breath. Anybody might prefer London and Rome and Holland to Paris and Florence and Germany. Lots of people did. She decided that her guilty conscience must be reaching an acute stage. Presently another disturbing thought occurred to her. Had Patterson been one of those traveling "friends"? She made up her mind to find out.

A day or two later her opportunity came, when they stood on the headland above Castle Rock and Bainbridge made the usual comparison between Santa Barbara Channel and the Bay of Naples.

"Who was with you over there?" she asked. "Anybody I know?"

"I think not. There were quite a lot of us. Some fellows I knew in college happened to be going over, and Steven Bond ... you don't know him, do you? ... and we all went by the same ship. A couple of us had sisters already there, and some cousins and aunts turned up. We had no formal party, and we split up into groups all the time, but we kept running across one another, and some of us were generally together. I came home once or twice, and then went back and picked up some of the others."

Failing to obtain the information she sought by direct questioning, Ruth resorted to subterfuge and laid snares for him, but, while he sometimes mentioned one or another of his traveling companions, he never spoke of Patterson, and gradually she ceased to watch for the name, although she never ceased wondering why these men were not close friends.

Meanwhile Bainbridge again and again postponed his departure, and Mrs. Royce, after satisfying herself by various quiet tests, as well as by some talks with her son, that the young man was thoroughly high-principled, of irreproachable manners, and independent means, allowed Ruth more liberty. Together the couple made excursions into the cañons, returning with branches of the delicate wild lilac or with huge bunches of nemophila and brodisea. They rode, marveling, through the orange-orchards of the Montecito Valley and the olive-groves at Elwood. Sometimes they went alone, sometimes with Ruth's Santa Barbara friends, sometimes with Eastern visitors whom Bainbridge met at the hotel, and whom he always contrived to present for Mrs. Royce's inspection before including them in these jaunts. He and Ruth made collections of sea-mosses, in the fashion of the day, and mounted them on cards. They made friends with the witty Superior of the Mission, who regaled them with tales from Santa Barbara's romantic history, and teased Ruth by taking Bainbridge into the cloistered garden where no woman may set her foot.

Illustration: SHE SLIPPED DOWN-STAIRS TO THE FIREPLACE AND BURNED THEM

Royce came down from San Francisco once or twice and looked on with amused satisfaction. Ruth gave him Patterson's latest letters to read—letters beginning to complain humorously of neglect—and Bainbridge told him that he wanted to marry his niece, which was duly communicated to her parents, who replied in trepidation that they would come West at once. Indeed, the young man's plight was obvious to him who ran, but not even Mrs. Royce, astute and watchful old worldling though she was, could tell how it was with the girl.

That she liked Bainbridge was evident, but while she laughed and danced, rode and tramped with him, she maintained toward him even more than the maidenly reserve approved by her grandmother. Only Ruth herself knew how his every taste, sentiment, and opinion were weighed against those of a man whom she had never seen, but whom she thought she knew ... and between them she discovered an astonishing similarity.

Illustration: "RUTH, I LOVE YOU! WON'T YOU GET OFF AND LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT IT?"

Bainbridge felt her critical attitude and walked carefully, even while he lost no opportunity to advance his still unspoken suit. On still nights "white with moonlight" he employed "the Spanish band," consisting of a trombone and two guitars, to serenade her. He ransacked the nurseries, in the absence of florists' shops, for flowers for her, sent to San Francisco for books and sweets, and was careful never to force himself upon her in her remoter moods. April came, with its splendor of blue and gold. Mustard, waist-high, gave its sweetness to the air, and lupines dyed the waysides blue, while roses threatened to choke the gardens, mingling their faint aroma with a hundred other perfumes. And as this combined charm of youth, congenial tastes and propinquity, fragrance and spring, worked its spell upon her, Ruth's problems intensified until they kept her awake o' nights and sobered her by day.

Once, when Bainbridge had been talking of his mother and sister, she said, thoughtfully:

"You're all awfully proper and conventional, aren't you?"

"Aren't you?" he countered, laughing. "You have the best taste of any girl I've ever known. That's one reason I admire you so tremendously." Her glance fell before the warmth of his, and he laughed happily. "I guess you're as 'proper and conventional' as we are."

"We are ... rather," she soberly admitted. "But ... why is everybody so hard on a girl's escapades when boys do lots worse things and nobody minds much?"

"What have you been up to?" he asked, mischievously. "'Fess up!"

"I don't need to be 'up to' anything to know that. People are hard on girls ... and it isn't fair! After all, we're human, just like boys!"

"Yes, of course ... and nobody really minds just a prank. But if a girl really breaks over ... well, it means a lot more than it does for a fellow, don't you think? The nice ones may do something just for a lark, but they always have good taste about it."

Remembering with a pang the tone in which her uncle had said, "This is less a matter of morality than of taste," Ruth was silent, but within her grew a hot resentment that Royce had permitted her to indulge what now seemed an insane desire. And yet ... Prescott Patterson had shown impeccable taste.

"Are all Harvard men exactly alike?" she demanded later the same afternoon, breaking into Bainbridge's discourse about salmon-fishing. "Do you all do the same things, and read the same things, and think the same way about them?"

"By no means," he returned, amused. "What put that notion into your head?"

"Well, I only know two. At least... I never saw the other one, but I ... I've read some letters he wrote, and ... except for two or three things, you might have written them yourself."

"So? Who is he?" He was watching her closely now.

"His name is Prescott Patterson."

Bainbridge shook his head. "Don't know him."

"You don't know him! Why ... he was in your class!"

"Patterson? No." Again he shook his head. "Nobody of that name in my class. I know a whole family of Pattersons, but none of them are Harvard men. Sure it wasn't Princeton?"

"I thought... He said Harvard," she replied, faintly. "Shall we go home? I'm getting tired."

That night, while her grandmother sonorously slept, Ruth read over every one of Patterson's letters, and then, white-faced and tight of lip, she slipped down-stairs to the fireplace and burned them, sternly stirring their dead ashes until not a fragment remained. The next morning, when she went for the mail, she stopped at the telegraph-office, also, and sent eight curt words to Prescott Patterson, Esq., "Do not dare to write to me again." Two later letters, arriving within a few days, she returned unopened.

After that she avoided Bainbridge when she could, and when they were together he found her listless and silent. Try as he would, he could not win her back to their former footing, and when they heard of the approaching marriage of one of the girls they both knew she said she didn't see how any girl could trust a man enough to marry him. As for herself, she had quite decided to be an old maid. Bainbridge was correspondingly despondent. She devoted a good deal of time to her grandmother, who had been rather neglected lately, and the observant old lady sent for the doctor, who gave Ruth a tonic, which she poured out of her window, a tea-spoonful at a time. Mrs. Royce daily gave thanks that the girl's parents would arrive soon and assume responsibility for their daughter's health.

A few days of this and then the blow fell. Fortunately Ruth intercepted the telegraph-boy at the gate or there's no knowing what would have happened. She signed the book, tore open the yellow envelope, and read:

Letter received have known something was wrong cannot lose you am leaving for Santa Barbara tonight due there steamer twenty third.

P. Patterson.

Crumpling the telegram in her hand, Ruth opened the gate and walked blindly until she found herself almost at the Mission, when she turned and went back to the Arlington, where she happened to find the little street-car, which bore her leisurely to the telegraph-office. She sent this message to her uncle:

P. P. on way here. Due twenty-third. Must get away. Please be sick or something and send for us. Nearly crazy.

By the first possible mail she received a letter from Royce, telling her that her plan was impracticable, but that instead of coming down with her parents by the steamer arriving on the eighteenth, as had been planned, he would take the next boat and talk to Patterson on the way down. "Don't worry," he wrote, "and don't tell anybody. This situation is largely my fault, and I'll see you through."

Illustration: "SO YOU KNEW ABOUT IT ALL THE TIME!"

Ruth failed to see how Royce's participation in her disgrace would help her position with her scandalized family or with the fastidious Bainbridge, but after a sleepless and tearful night, when she made and rejected one desperate plan of escape after another, she decided that if her world must end so soon, she would make the most of what happiness remained to her. Therefore Bainbridge found himself taken into favor again, and once more Ruth rode and tramped, jested and laughed with him, but her gaiety was feverish. Her parents arrived—her father shrewd and cool, her mother precise, humorless, and worldly—and they looked upon Bainbridge and found him desirable.

On the morning of the twenty-third the young people galloped again down the beach toward Ortega Hill, where they had taken that first magical ride together. Ruth seemed in high spirits, but Bainbridge was unusually silent. When they had passed the first point he checked his horse and dismounted.

"Let's sit down in the sand," he suggested, holding up a hand to help her. "I want to tell you something."

She lifted a mutinous chin. "No, I don't want to sit in the sand. I'm not a crab nor yet a sand-flea! I want to ride and ride and ride!"

"With me?"

"I just want to ride ... away," she said, but her voice shook.

"Never away from me!" He caught the hand with which she was brushing at her habit, pulled off the gauntlet, and kissed her soft palm. "Ruth, I love you! Won't you get off and let me tell you about it?"

"No! You mustn't! I ... I... Oh, you mustn't!"

"But I do! Don't you care ... a bit?"

"Oh, please! I didn't mean... You don't know.... Oh, you wouldn't if you knew!"

Bainbridge blanched. "You mean ... there's somebody else?"

"Don't!" she cried. "Oh ... don't!"

With a sob she pulled her hand away and gave her horse a sharp cut, wheeling him toward town. He mounted hastily and gave chase.

When he caught her he said: "Tell me just that much. Is there anybody else?"

But she turned away her face and would not answer. In silence they galloped back to town. At her grandmother's gate she slipped out of her saddle before he could reach her and stepped inside the yard, closing the gate between them.

"Good-by," she said, brokenly. "You'd better ... go away. I didn't mean... Oh, good-by!" She turned swiftly and ran toward the house.

At half past four, lying face down on her bed, she heard the gun with which steamers announced their approach in those days, and shuddered. The rest of the family had gone to the wharf to meet Royce, but she had pleaded a headache. Shortly after five the door-bell rang, and Fong brought her a familiar card: "Mr. Prescott Patterson."

"Tell him I can't see him."

"Missa Loyce, he come, too."

"Aren't the others ... Mrs. Royce and my father and mother ... down there?"

"No come. Missa Loyce, he say go dlive."

"I'll come, then."

When she entered the little sitting-room the first person she saw was Jack Bainbridge, looking flushed and somber. Across the room was her uncle, fatuously smiling, and beside him... a woman.

"Oh.... excuse me," Ruth apologized, wanly. "I thought Mr. Patterson..."

"You poor child!" The stranger took her unresponsive hands in a close clasp. "I'm Prescott Patterson... Kate Prescott Patterson ... and I'm Jack's half-sister!"

"You ... You!"

"You see, I was bored, too. I'd been awfully ill, and was shut in my room, chafing ... and Teddy thought it would amuse us both ... keep us out of mischief"—Kate's gray eyes shot a twinkling glance at Royce and her humorous lips twitched a little—"so he telegraphed to me, and ... I fell!"

"You!" Ruth repeated, in a daze. "It was you!"

"When your letters began coming I fell head over heels in love with you! And Jack ... he knew all about it, you see... I patterned Prescott Patterson after Jack.... He read your letters and fell in love with you, too! That's the reason he came out here."

"So you knew about it all the time!" Ruth recovered her tongue, and her eyes blazed at Bainbridge over hot cheeks. "You've all been amusing yourselves at my expense!" She turned on her uncle. "Oh, you might have told me!"

"I was afraid to, after you got into the thing. I thought you were in love with the fellow, and ... I didn't want to give you a shock. You scared me nearly to death! Then Jack turned up..."

"And he thought you were in love with me, too!" Kate interrupted, with a humorous glance at her lowering young brother. "He's hated me bitterly ever since!"

"Then why didn't you tell me?" Ruth demanded of him.

"Because I didn't choose to play second fiddle! That's why!" he hotly informed her. "I didn't care to be a substitute for Prescott Patterson, even if he was a myth! If I couldn't be first... Anyhow, I kept hoping you'd tell me. I gave you chances enough!"

"Oh yes, you left it all to me! You all knew ... you planned it..." Her indignant eyes scorched Royce again. "And you ... you! ... deliberately let me go through all this...."

"I let you take some of the consequences at the last ... yes," he gravely admitted. "You see what might have happened. Ruth!" She had whirled toward the door. "Don't go! See here, dear. You mustn't feel this way!" He spoke tenderly, and tried to lay his hand on her arm, but she backed away. "We didn't mean to hurt you ... the thing just grew beyond us. But it started as an amusement for you, and the first suggestion didn't come from us. Remember that. There's something else," he added, even more tenderly. "Kate has promised to marry me, Ruth ... and I want you to love her!"

"I won't! I hate her! I hate every one of you! You're cruel! You've all conspired ... fooled me ... laughed at me ... and I ... I've..."

"I haven't laughed at you," Kate said, going close to her and speaking softly. "I may have fooled you—a little. But when I found you were in trouble I came across the continent to see you and to ask you with my own lips..." She paused, and a gleam of laughter crossed her face. "Ruth, you told me never to write to you again. You've rejected me ... but I can't lose you! Won't you at least ... oh, my dear ... please ... be a sister to me?"

For a moment Ruth stared into the whimsical, pleading face, and then broke into peals of hysterical laughter.

"If you knew," she gasped, "if you only knew ... how I've cried and cried ... and cried ... because I thought ... I never could be!"

"Ruth!" Bainbridge had her by the shoulders. "Do you mean that?"

"Come along, Teddy!" Prescott Patterson called, fleeing. "This is no place for us!"