“All right. You’re free for the day,” he repeated generously and, without more ceremony, he hurried off to Cady.
Ruth waited until he had time to leave the building before she closed the office and went down the stairs. She stepped out to the street, only one girl among thousands that morning dismissed from bleak offices—one of thousands to whom it seemed ignominious that day, when all the war was going so badly and when Gerry Hull was arriving from France, to go right back to one’s room and do nothing more for the war than to knit until it was time to go to bed and sleep to arise next morning to come down to make out more deeds and contracts for men like Sam Hilton.
Had it been a month or two earlier, Ruth again would have made the rounds of the headquarters where girls gave themselves for real war work; but now she knew that further effort would be fruitless. Everyone in Chicago, who possessed authority to select girls for work in France, knew her registration card by heart—her name, her age, the fact that she had a high-school education. They were familiar with the occupations in which she claimed experience—office assistant; cooking; care of children (had she not taken care of her sisters?); first aid; can drive motor car; operate typewriter. Everyone knew that her health was excellent; her sight and hearing perfect. She would go “anywhere”; she would start “at any time.” But everyone also knew that answer which truth had obliged her to write to the challenge, “What persons dependent upon you, if any?” So everyone knew that though Ruth Alden would give herself to any work, someone had to find, above her expenses, seven hundred and eighty dollars a year for her family.
Accordingly she could think of nothing better to do this morning than to join the throng of those who were going to Michigan Avenue and to the building where the British and French party, with which Gerry Hull was traveling, would be welcomed to the city. Ruth had no idea of being admitted to the building; she merely stood in the crowd upon the walk; but close to where she stood, a limousine halted. A window of the car was down; and suddenly Ruth saw Gerry Hull right before her. She knew him at once from his picture; he was tall and active looking, even though sitting quiet in the car; he was bending forward a bit and the sudden, slight motions of his straight, lithe shoulders and the quick turn of his head as he gazed out, told of the vigor and impetuousness which—Ruth knew—were his.
He had a clear, dark skin; his hair and brows were dark; his eyes, blue and observant and interested. He had the firm, determined chin of a fighter; his mouth was pleasant and likable. He was younger looking than his pictures had made him appear; not younger than his age, which Ruth knew was twenty-four. Indeed, he looked older than four and twenty; yet one could not say that he looked two years older or five or ten; the maturity which war had brought Gerry Hull was not the sort which one could reckon in years. It made one—at least it made Ruth—pulse all at once with amazing feeling for him, with a strange mixture of anger that such a boy must have experienced that which had so seared his soul, and of pride in him that he had sought the experience. He was a little excited now at being home again, Ruth thought, in this city where his grandfather had made his fortune, where his father had died and where he, himself, had spent his boyhood; he turned to point out something to the girl who was seated beside him; so Ruth gazed at her and recognized her, too. She was Lady Agnes Ertyle, young and slight and very lovely with her brown hair and gray eyes and fair, English complexion and straight, pure features. She had something too of that maturity, not of years, which Gerry Hull had; she was a little tired and not excited as was he. But for all that, she was beautiful and very young and not at all a strange creation in spite of her title and in spite of all that her family—her father and her brothers and she herself—had done in Belgium and in France. Indeed, she was only a girl of twenty-two or three. So Ruth quite forgot herself in the feeling of rebuke which this view of Gerry Hull and Lady Agnes brought to her. They were not much older or intrinsically different from herself and they had already done so much; and she—nothing!
She was so close to them that they had to observe her; and the English girl nodded to her friendlily and a little surprised. Gerry Hull seemed not surprised; but he did not nod; he just gazed back at her.
“What ought I be doing?” Ruth heard her voice appealing to them.
Lady Agnes Ertyle attempted no reply to this extraordinary query; but Gerry Hull’s eyes were studying her and he seemed, in some way, to understand her perplexity and dismay.
“Anyone can trust you to find out!” he replied to her aloud, yet as if in comment to himself rather than in answer to her. The car moved and left Ruth with that—with Gerry Hull’s assurance to himself that she could be trusted to discover what she should do. She did not completely understand what he meant; for she did not know what he had been thinking when she suddenly thought out aloud before him and surprised him into doing the same. Nevertheless this brief encounter stirred and stimulated her; she could not meekly return to her room after this; so, when the crowd broke up, she went over to State Street.
The wide, wind-swept way, busy and bleak below the towering sheer of the great department stores, the hotels and office buildings on either hand seemed to Ruth never so sordid and self-concerned as upon this morning. Here and there a flag flapped from a rope stretched across the street or from a pole pointing obliquely to the sky; but these merely acknowledged formal recognition of a state of war; they were not symbols of any evident performance of act of defense. The people who passed either entirely ignored these flags or noticed them dully, without the slightest show of feeling. Many of these people, as Ruth knew, must have sons or brothers in the training camps; a few might possess sons in the regiments already across the water; but if Ruth observed any of these, she was unable to distinguish them this morning from the throng of the indifferent going about their private and petty preoccupations with complete engrossment. Likewise was she powerless to discriminate those—not few in number—who mingled freely in the groups passing under the flags but who gazed up, not with true indifference, but with hotly hostile reactions.