, and within it
they had found too easy, pre-prepared sailing for any real finding or
tests of themselves. They were daughters of two of the town's most
important families; they were two of the town's most attractive girls.
That fixed their place in a round of things not deepening, not
individualizing. It was pleasant, rather characterless living on a
limited little part of the surface of life. They went to "the parties,"
occupied with that social round that is as definite a thing in a town of
forty thousand as in a metropolis. Their emotional experiences had been
little more than part of their social life--within it and of the
character of it. Attractive, popular, of uncontested place in the
society in which they found themselves, they had not known the strivings
and the heart-aches that can intensify life within those social
boundaries. They were always invited. When they sat out dances it was
because they wanted to. Life had dealt too favoringly and too
uneventfully with them to find out what stuff was really in them. They
were almost always spoken of together--Edith Lawrence and Ruth
Holland--Ruth and Edith. That was of long standing; they had gone to
primary school together, to Sunday-school, through the high-school. They
told each other things; they even hinted at emotions concealed within
their breasts, of dissatisfactions and longings there were no words for.
Once Ruth confided that sometimes she wept and could not have said why,
and great seemed the marvel when Edith confessed to similar experiences.
They never suspected that girlhood was like that; they were like that,
and set apart and united in being so.

But those spiritual indulgences were rare; for the most part they were
what would be called two wholesome, happy girls, girls whose lot had
fallen in pleasant places.

Ruth wanted to go to college, but her father had kept her from it. Women
should marry and settle down and have families was the belief of Cyrus
Holland. Going to college put foolish notions in their heads. Not being
able to go had been Ruth's first big disappointment. Edith had gone East
to a girls' school. At the last minute, realizing how lonely she would
be at home without her chum, Ruth had begged to go with her. Her mother
had urged it for her. But it was an expensive school to which Edith was
going, and when he found what it would cost Ruth's father refused,
saying he could not afford it, and that it was nonsense, anyway. Ruth
had the