instead of letting her heart be touched with the solemnity and beauty of the grand hymn which rolled down those long aisles.  Satan has that everlasting weapon, “What to wear, and what not to wear,” everlastingly at command and wonderfully under his control.  But Ruth, in her way, was strong-minded and could control her thoughts when she chose; so she presently shook off the feeling of annoyance and decided to give herself up to the influences of the hour.

By this time Dr. Cuyler appeared and was introduced, Ruth gave him the benefit of a very searching gaze, and decided that he was the very last man of all those on the platform whom she would have selected as the speaker.  Probably if Dr. Cuyler had known this, and known also that his personal presence entirely disappointed her, he would not have been greatly disconcerted thereby.  But his subject was one that found an answering thrill in this young lady’s heart—­“Some Talks I Have Had With Great Men.”  Ruth liked greatness.  In her calm, composed way she bowed before it.  She would have enjoyed being great.  Celebrity in a majestic, dignified form would have been her delight.  She by no means admitted this, as Eurie Mitchell so often did.  She by no means sought after it in the small ways within her reach.  Small ways did not suit her; they disgusted her.  But if she could have flashed into splendid greatness, if by any amount of laborious study, or work, or suffering, she could have seen the way to world-wide renown she would have grasped for it in an instant.

The next best thing to being renowned one’s self was to have renowned people for friends.  This was another thing that Ruth coveted in silence.  She wanted no one to know how earnestly she aspired to, sometime, making the acquaintance of some of the great people not—­the vulgarly great, those who were in a sense, and in the eyes of a few, great because of the accidents of fortune and travel.  She knew such by the scores.  Indeed, she had been in circles many a time where she shone with that sort of greatness herself.  Perhaps it was for that reason that it was such a despised height to her.  But she meant the really great people of this world—­people of power, people who moved the masses by the force of their brains.  Not one such had she ever met to look upon as an acquaintance; and here was this man telling off the honored names by the score, and saying, “My friend, Dr. Guthrie”—­“My good friend, Thomas Carlyle”—­“My dear brother, Newman Hall.”  How would it seem to stand in intimate relationship with one single gifted mind like these, and was she destined ever to know by actual experience?

There was another reason why Ruth had desired to choose Dr. Cuyler to listen to rather than some other names on the programme, because, from the nature of his subject she had judged it most unlikely that he should have about him any arrows that would touch home to her.  Not that she put it in that language; she did not admit even to herself that any of the solemn words that had been spoken at Chautauqua had reference to her; and yet in a vague, fitful way she was ill at ease.