ly upon the portfolio of theme paper I carry
underneath my arm. But in this corner of the world a portfolio of theme
paper and a pile of books are as common a part of a girl's paraphernalia
as a muff and a shopping-bag on a winter's day on Fifth Avenue. Lucy
lives in a university town. The university is devoted principally to the
education of men, but there is a girls' college connected with it, so
if I am caught scribbling no one except Lucy needs to wonder why.

I have discovered a pretty bit of woods a mile west of Lucy's house, and
an unexpected rustic seat built among a company of murmurous young pines
beside a lake. Opposite the seat is an ecstatic little maple tree, at
this season of the year flaunting all the pinks and reds and yellows of
a fiery opal. There, sheltered by the pines, undisturbed except by a
scurrying chipmunk or two or an inquisitive, gray-tailed squirrel, I sit
and write.

I heard Lucy tell Will the other day (Will is my intellectual
brother-in-law) that she was really anxious about me. She believed I was
writing poetry! "And whenever a healthy, normal girl like Ruth begins to
write poetry," she added, "after a catastrophe like hers, look out for
her. Sanitariums are filled with such."

Poetry! I wish it were. Poetry indeed! Good heavens! I am writing a
defense.

I am the youngest member of a large grown-up family, all married now
except myself and a confirmed bachelor brother in New York. We are the
Vars of Hilton, Massachusetts, cotton mill owners originally, but now a
little of everything and scattered from Wisconsin to the Atlantic Ocean.
I am a New England girl, not the timid, resigned type one usually thinks
of when the term is used, but the kind that goes away to a fashionable
boarding-school when she is sixteen, has an elaborate coming-out party
two years later, and then proves herself either a success or a failure
according to the number of invitations she receives and the frequency
with which her dances are cut into at the balls. She is supposed to feel
grateful for the sacrifices that are made for her debut, and the best
way to show it is by becoming engaged when the time is right to a man
one rung higher up on the social ladder than she.

I had no mother to guide me through these intricacies. My pilot was my
ambitious sister-in-law, Edith, who married Alec when I was fifteen,
remodeled our old 240 Main Street, Hilton, Mass., into a very grand and
elegant mansion and christened i