"You won't have much left to create it with," scoffed the Big Brother, kicking the tortured wreck of a straw hat farther back into the flames.
The girl reached up impatiently and smutted her other hand across her eyes. "Nothing left to create it with?" she mocked. "Why, if I had anything left to create it with, I'd be only a—mechanic!"
Then, blackened like a coal-heaver and tousled like a Skye terrier, she picked up the scarlet bellows and commenced to pump a savage yellow flame into a writhing, half-charred bundle of letters.
Through all the sweet, calm hours of that warm June night the sacrifice progressed with amazing rapacity. By midnight she had just finished stirring the fire-tongs through the ghostly, lacelike ashes of her wedding gown. At two o'clock her violin went groaning into the flames. At three her Big Brother, yawning sleepily back in his nightclothes, picked her up bodily and dumped her into her bed. He was very angry. "Little Sister," he scolded, "there's no man living worth the fuss you're making over Aleck Reese!" And the little sister sat up and rubbed her smutty, scorched cheek against his cool, blue-shaven face as she tilted the drifting ashes from the bedspread. "I'm not making any 'fuss,'" she protested. "I'm only just—burning my bridges." It was the first direct allusion that she had ever made to her trouble.
Twice after that—between three o'clock and breakfast time—the Big Brother woke from his sleep with a horrid sense that the house was on fire. Twice between three o'clock and breakfast time he met the Housekeeper scuttling along the halls on the same sniffy errand. Once with a flickering candle-light Ruth herself crept out to the doorway and laughed at them. "The house isn't on fire, you sillies," she cried. "Don't you know a burnt bridge when you smell it?" But the doctor had said quite distinctly: "You must watch that little girl. Sorrow in the tongue will talk itself cured, if you give it a chance; but sorrow in the eyes has a wicked, wicked way now and then of leaking into the brain."
It was the Housekeeper, though, whose eyes looked worried and tortured at breakfast time. It was the Big Brother's face that showed a bit sharp on the cheek-bones. Ruth herself, for the first time in a listless, uncollared, unbelted, unstarched month, came frisking down to the table as white and fresh and crisp as linen and starch and curls could make her.
"I'm going to town this morning," she announced nonchalantly to her relieved and delighted hearers. The eyes that turned to her brother's were almost mischievous. "Couldn't you meet me at twelve o'clock," she suggested, "and take me off to the shore somewhere for lunch? I'll be shopping on Main Street about that time, so suppose I meet you at Andrew Bernard's office."
Half an hour later she was stealing out of the creaky back door into the garden, along the gray, pebbly gravel walk between the tall tufts of crimson and purple phlox, to the little gay-faced plot of heart's-ease where the family doctor, symbolist and literalist, had bade her dig and delve every day in the good, hot, wholesome, freckly sunshine. Close by in the greensward an absurd pet lamb was tugging and bouncing at the end of its stingy tether. In a moment's time the girl had transferred the clumsy iron tether-stake to the midst of her posy bed. Then she started for the gate.
Pausing for just one repentant second with her hand on the gate latch, she turned and looked back to the ruthlessly trodden spot where the bland-eyed lamb stood eyeing her quizzically with his soft, woolly mouth fairly dripping with the tender, precious blossoms. "Heart's-ease. B-a-a!" mocked the girl, with a flicker of real amusement. "Heart's-ease. B-a-a-a!" scoffed the lamb, just because his stomach and his tongue happened to be made like that. Then with a quick dodge across the lane she ran to meet the electric car and started off triumphantly for the city, shutting her faint eyes resolutely away from all the roadside pools and ponds and gleams of river whose molten, ultimate peace possibilities had lured her sick mind so incessantly for the past dozen weeks.
Two hours later, with a hectic spurt of energy, she was racing up three winding, dizzy flights of stairs in a ponderous, old-fashioned office building.