“And aren’t you tired sometimes of the
struggle?”
“Tired? Yes, everybody is tired I suppose.
But it is a glorious profession. And would
you want me to be dependent, Philip?”
“Well, yes, a little,” said Philip, feeling
his way towards what he wanted to say.
“On what, for instance, just now?” asked
Ruth, a little maliciously Philip thought.
“Why, on——” he couldn’t
quite say it, for it occurred to him that he was a
poor stick for any body to lean on in the present state
of his fortune, and that the woman before him was
at least as independent as he was.
“I don’t mean depend,” he began
again. “But I love you, that’s all.
Am I nothing—to you?” And Philip
looked a little defiant, and as if he had said something
that ought to brush away all the sophistries of obligation
on either side, between man and woman.
Perhaps Ruth saw this. Perhaps she saw that
her own theories of a certain equality of power, which
ought to precede a union of two hearts, might be pushed
too far. Perhaps she had felt sometimes her own
weakness and the need after all of so dear a sympathy
and so tender an interest confessed, as that which
Philip could give. Whatever moved her—the
riddle is as old as creation—she simply
looked up to Philip and said in a low voice, “Everything.”
And Philip clasping both her hands in his, and looking
down into her eyes, which drank in all his tenderness
with the thirst of a true woman’s nature—
“Oh! Philip, come out here,” shouted
young Eli, throwing the door wide open.
And Ruth escaped away to her room, her heart singing
again, and now as if it would burst for joy, “Philip
has come.”
That night Philip received a dispatch from Harry—“The
trial begins tomorrow.”
December 18—, found Washington Hawkins
and Col. Sellers once more at the capitol of
the nation, standing guard over the University bill.
The former gentleman was despondent, the latter hopeful.
Washington’s distress of mind was chiefly on
Laura’s account. The court would soon
sit to try her, case, he said, and consequently a great
deal of ready money would be needed in the engineering
of it. The University bill was sure to pass
this, time, and that would make money plenty, but might
not the, help come too late? Congress had only
just assembled, and delays were to be feared.
“Well,” said the Colonel, “I don’t
know but you are more or less right, there.
Now let’s figure up a little on, the preliminaries.
I think Congress always tries to do as near right
as it can, according to its lights. A man can’t
ask any fairer, than that. The first preliminary
it always starts out on, is, to clean itself, so to
speak. It will arraign two or three dozen of
its members, or maybe four or five dozen, for taking
bribes to vote for this and that and the other bill
last winter.”
