“Do you look upon them as I subjects, dear?” she would ask.

And Ruth laughed her merriest laugh, and then looked sober again.  Perhaps she was thinking, after all, whether she knew herself.

If you should rear a duck in the heart of the Sahara, no doubt it would swim if you brought it to the Nile.

Surely no one would have predicted when Ruth left Philadelphia that she would become absorbed to this extent, and so happy, in a life so unlike that she thought she desired.  But no one can tell how a woman will act under any circumstances.  The reason novelists nearly always fail in depicting women when they make them act, is that they let them do what they have observed some woman has done at sometime or another.  And that is where they make a mistake; for a woman will never do again what has been done before.  It is this uncertainty that causes women, considered as materials for fiction, to be so interesting to themselves and to others.

As the fall went on and the winter, Ruth did not distinguish herself greatly at the Fallkill Seminary as a student, a fact that apparently gave her no anxiety, and did not diminish her enjoyment of a new sort of power which had awakened within her.

Chapter XXII.  In mid-winter, an event occurred of unusual interest to the inhabitants of the Montague house, and to the friends of the young ladies who sought their society.

This was the arrival at the Sassacua Hotel of two young gentlemen from the west.

It is the fashion in New England to give Indian names to the public houses, not that the late lamented savage knew how to keep a hotel, but that his warlike name may impress the traveler who humbly craves shelter there, and make him grateful to the noble and gentlemanly clerk if he is allowed to depart with his scalp safe.

The two young gentlemen were neither students for the Fallkill Seminary, nor lecturers on physiology, nor yet life assurance solicitors, three suppositions that almost exhausted the guessing power of the people at the hotel in respect to the names of “Philip Sterling and Henry Brierly, Missouri,” on the register.  They were handsome enough fellows, that was evident, browned by out-door exposure, and with a free and lordly way about them that almost awed the hotel clerk himself.  Indeed, he very soon set down Mr. Brierly as a gentleman of large fortune, with enormous interests on his shoulders.  Harry had a way of casually mentioning western investments, through lines, the freighting business, and the route through the Indian territory to Lower California, which was calculated to give an importance to his lightest word.

“You’ve a pleasant town here, sir, and the most comfortable looking hotel I’ve seen out of New York,” said Harry to the clerk; “we shall stay here a few days if you can give us a roomy suite of apartments.”

Harry usually had the best of everything, wherever he went, as such fellows always do have in this accommodating world.  Philip would have been quite content with less expensive quarters, but there was no resisting Harry’s generosity in such matters.