The spinsters stared at her blankly.

Ruth went on to explain.  “When a man reaches the lowest scale through drink, we call him a beachcomber.  I suppose the phrase—­the word—­originally meant a man who searched for food on the beach.  The poor things!  Oh, it was quite dreadful.  It is queer, but men of education and good birth fall swiftest and lowest.”

She sent a covert glance toward the young man.  She alone of them all knew that he was on the first leg of the terrible journey to the beach.  Somebody ought to talk to him, warn him.  He was all alone, like herself.

“What are those odd-looking things on the roofs?” she asked of Ah Cum.

“Pigs and fish, to fend off the visitations of the devil.”  Ah Cum smiled.  “After all, I believe we Chinese have the right idea.  The devil is on top, not below.  We aren’t between him and heaven; he is between us and heaven.”

The spinsters had no counter-philosophy to offer; so they turned to Ruth, who had singularly and unconsciously invested herself with glamour, the glamour of adventure, which the old maids did not recognize as such because they were only tourists.  This child at once alarmed and thrilled them.  She had come across the wicked South Seas which were still infested with cannibals; she had seen drunkenness and called men beachcombers; who was this moment as innocent as a babe, and in the next uttered some bitter wisdom it had taken a thousand years of philosophy to evolve.  And there was that dress of hers!  She must be warned that she had been imposed upon.

“You’ll pardon an old woman, Miss Enschede,” said Sister Prudence; “but where in this world did you get that dress?”

Ruth picked up both sides of the skirt and spread it, looking down.  “Is there anything wrong with it?”

“Wrong?  Why, you have been imposed upon somewhere.  That dress is thirty years old, if a day.”

“Oh!” Ruth laughed softly.  “That is easily explained.  I haven’t much 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.