It was a most unreasonable feeling.  No home could be pleasanter than Ruth’s.  The house, a little out of the city; was one of those elegant country residences which so much charm visitors to the suburbs of Philadelphia.  A modern dwelling and luxurious in everything that wealth could suggest for comfort, it stood in the midst of exquisitely kept lawns, with groups of trees, parterres of flowers massed in colors, with greenhouse, grapery and garden; and on one side, the garden sloped away in undulations to a shallow brook that ran over a pebbly bottom and sang under forest trees.  The country about teas the perfection of cultivated landscape, dotted with cottages, and stately mansions of Revolutionary date, and sweet as an English country-side, whether seen in the soft bloom of May or in the mellow ripeness of late October.

It needed only the peace of the mind within, to make it a paradise.  One riding by on the Old Germantown road, and seeing a young girl swinging in the hammock on the piazza and, intent upon some volume of old poetry or the latest novel, would no doubt have envied a life so idyllic.  He could not have imagined that the young girl was reading a volume of reports of clinics and longing to be elsewhere.

Ruth could not have been more discontented if all the wealth about her had been as unsubstantial as a dream.  Perhaps she so thought it.

“I feel,” she once said to her father, “as if I were living in a house of cards.”

“And thee would like to turn it into a hospital?”

“No.  But tell me father,” continued Ruth, not to be put off, “is thee still going on with that Bigler and those other men who come here and entice thee?”

Mr. Bolton smiled, as men do when they talk with women about “business” “Such men have their uses, Ruth.  They keep the world active, and I owe a great many of my best operations to such men.  Who knows, Ruth, but this new land purchase, which I confess I yielded a little too much to Bigler in, may not turn out a fortune for thee and the rest of the children?”

“Ah, father, thee sees every thing in a rose-colored light.  I do believe thee wouldn’t have so readily allowed me to begin the study of medicine, if it hadn’t had the novelty of an experiment to thee.”

“And is thee satisfied with it?”

“If thee means, if I have had enough of it, no.  I just begin to see what I can do in it, and what a noble profession it is for a woman.  Would thee have me sit here like a bird on a bough and wait for somebody to come and put me in a cage?”

Mr. Bolton was not sorry to divert the talk from his own affairs, and he did not think it worth while to tell his family of a performance that very day which was entirely characteristic of him.

Ruth might well say that she felt as if she were living in a house of cards, although the Bolton household had no idea of the number of perils that hovered over them, any more than thousands of families in America have of the business risks and contingences upon which their prosperity and luxury hang.