money; I don't know how much it is going to cost me to reach
Hartford; so I fixed over a couple of my mother's dresses. It
doesn't look bad, does it?"

"Mercy, no! That wasn't the thought. It was that somebody had
cheated you."

The spinster did not ask if the mother lived; the question was
inconsequent. No mother would have sent her daughter into the world
with such a wardrobe. Straitened circumstances would not have
mattered; a mother would have managed somehow. In the '80s such a
dress would have indicated considerable financial means; under the
sun-helmet it was an anachronism; and yet it served only to add a
quainter charm to the girl's beauty.

"Do you know what you make me think of?"

"What?"

"As if you had stepped out of some old family album."

The feminine vanities in Ruth were quiescent; nothing had ever
occurred in her life to tingle them into action. She was dressed as
a white woman should be; and that for the present satisfied her
instincts. But she threw a verbal bombshell into the spinsters'
camp.

"What is a family album?"

"You poor child, do you mean to tell me you've never seen a family
album? Why, it's a book filled with the photographs of your
grandmothers and grandfathers, your aunts and uncles and cousins,
your mother and father when they were little."

Ruth stood with drawn brows; she was trying to recall. "No; we
never had one; at least, I never saw it."

The lack of a family album for some reason put a little ache in her
heart. Grandmothers and grandfathers and uncles and aunts ... to
love and to coddle lonely little girls.

"You poor child!" said Prudence.

"Then I am old-fashioned. Is that it? I thought this very pretty."

"So it is, child. But one changes the style of one's clothes
yearly. Of course, this does not apply to uninteresting old maids,"
Prudence modified with a dry little smile.

"But this is good enough to travel in, isn't it?"

"To be sure it is. When you reach San Francisco, you can buy
something more appropriate." It occurred to the spinster to ask:
"Have you ever seen a fashion magazine?"

"No. Sometimes we had the _Illustrated London News_ and _Tit-Bits._
Sailors would leave them at the trader's."

"Alice in Wonderland!" cried Prudence, perhaps a little enviously.

"Oh, I've read that!"

Spurlock had heard distinctly enough all of this odd conversation;
but until the spinster's reference to the family album, no phrase
had been sufficient in stre