th
Erskine, dwelling in solitary grandeur in her royal home, as American
royalty goes, the sole daughter, the sole child indeed of the house, a
girl who had no idea of life except as a place in which to have a
serenely good time, and teach everybody to do as she desired them to.
Money was a commonplace matter-of-course article, neither to be
particularly prized nor despised; it was convenient, of course, and must
be an annoyance when one had to do without it; but of that, by practical
experience, she knew nothing. Yet Ruth was by no means a
"pink-and-white" girl without character; on the contrary, she had plenty
of character, but hitherto it had been frittered away on nothings, until
it looked as much like nothing as it could. She was the sort of person
whom education and circumstances of the right sort would have developed
into splendor, but the development had not taken place. Now you are not
to suppose that she was uneducated; that would be a libel on Madame La
Fonte and her fashionable seminary. She had graduated with honor; taken
the first prizes in everything. She knew all about seminaries; so do I;
and if you do, you are ready to admit that the development had not come.
There is constantly occurring something to take back. While I write I
have in mind an institution where the earnest desire sought after and
prayed for is the higher development, not alone of the intellect, but of
the heart: where the wonderful woman who is at its head said to me a few
years ago:

"If a lady has spent three years under my care, and graduated, and gone
out from me not a Christian, I feel like going down on my knees in
bitterness of soul, and crying, 'Lord, I have failed in the trust thou
didst give me." But the very fact that the word "wonderful" fits that
woman's name is proof enough that such institutions as hers are rare,
and it was not at that seminary that Ruth Erskine graduated. She was
spending her life in elegant pursuits that meant nothing, those of them
which did not mean worse than nothing, and the only difference between
her and a hundred others around her was that she knew perfectly well
that they all amounted to nothing, and didn't hesitate to say so,
therefore she earned the title of "queer." At the same time she did not
hesitate to lead the whirl around this continuous nothing, therefore she
occupied that perilous position of being liked and admired and envied,
all in one. Very few people loved her, and queerly enoug