As soon as Beriah Sellers had bade his friends good
night and seen them depart, he did not retire apartments
in the Planter’s, but took his way to his lodgings
with a friend in a distant part of the city.
The letter that Philip Sterling wrote to Ruth Bolton,
on the evening of setting out to seek his fortune
in the west, found that young lady in her own father’s
house in Philadelphia. It was one of the pleasantest
of the many charming suburban houses in that hospitable
city, which is territorially one of the largest cities
in the world, and only prevented from becoming the
convenient metropolis of the country by the intrusive
strip of Camden and Amboy sand which shuts it off from
the Atlantic ocean. It is a city of steady thrift,
the arms of which might well be the deliberate but
delicious terrapin that imparts such a royal flavor
to its feasts.
It was a spring morning, and perhaps it was the influence
of it that made Ruth a little restless, satisfied
neither with the out-doors nor the in-doors.
Her sisters had gone to the city to show some country
visitors Independence Hall, Girard College and Fairmount
Water Works and Park, four objects which Americans
cannot die peacefully, even in Naples, without having
seen. But Ruth confessed that she was tired of
them, and also of the Mint. She was tired of
other things. She tried this morning an air
or two upon the piano, sang a simple song in a sweet
but slightly metallic voice, and then seating herself
by the open window, read Philip’s letter.
Was she thinking about Philip, as she gazed across
the fresh lawn over the tree tops to the Chelton Hills,
or of that world which his entrance, into her tradition-bound
life had been one of the means of opening to her?
Whatever she thought, she was not idly musing, as
one might see by the expression of her face.
After a time she took up a book; it was a medical
work, and to all appearance about as interesting to
a girl of eighteen as the statutes at large; but her
face was soon aglow over its pages, and she was so
absorbed in it that she did not notice the entrance
of her mother at the open door.
“Ruth?”
“Well, mother,” said the young student,
looking up, with a shade of impatience.
“I wanted to talk with thee a little about thy
plans.”
“Mother; thee knows I couldn’t stand it
at Westfield; the school stifled me, it’s a
place to turn young people into dried fruit.”
“I know,” said Margaret Bolton, with a
half anxious smile, thee chafes against all the ways
of Friends, but what will thee do? Why is thee
so discontented?”
“If I must say it, mother, I want to go away,
and get out of this dead level.”
With a look half of pain and half of pity, her mother
answered, “I am sure thee is little interfered
with; thee dresses as thee will, and goes where thee
pleases, to any church thee likes, and thee has music.
I had a visit yesterday from the society’s
committee by way of discipline, because we have a
piano in the house, which is against the rules.”
