“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 enough she knew that too, and instead of resenting it realized that she could not see why they should.  She was, moreover, remarkably careful as to her leading after all, and those who followed were sure of being led in an eminently respectable and fashionable way.  Her most intimate friend was Eurie Mitchell, which was not strange when one considered what remarkable opposites in character they were.  Eureka J. Mitchell was the respectable sounding name that the young lady bore, but the full name would have sounded utterly strange to her ears, the wild little word “Eurie” seeming to have been made on purpose for her.  She was the eldest daughter of a large, good-natured, hard-working, much-bewildered family.  They never knew just where they belonged.  They went to the First Church, which for itself should have settled their position, since it was the opinion of most of its members that it was organized especially that the “first families” might have a church-home.  But they occupied a very front seat, by reason of their inability to pay for a middle one, which was bad for “position,” as First Church gentility went.  What was surprising to them was how they ever happened to have the money to pay for that seat; but, let me record it to their honor, they always happened to have it.  They were honest.  They ought to have been called “the happen family,” by reason of their inability to tell how much or how little they might happen to have to live on, whether they could afford three new dresses apiece or none at all.  The fact being that it depended on the amount of sickness there was in Dr. Mitchell’s beat whether there were to be luxuries or simple bare necessities, with some wonderment as to how even those were to be paid.