"Uh-huh." For the life of him, O'Higgins could not think of anything else to say. Just because she was sorry for that young fool! "Uh-huh," he repeated, rising and bowing as he passed Ruth's table. He wished he had the time to solve this riddle, for it was a riddle, and four-square besides. Back in the States young women did not offer to play the Good Samaritan to strange young fools whom Jawn D. Barleycorn had sent to the mat for the count of nine: unless the young fool's daddy had a bundle of coin. Maybe the girl was telling the truth, and then again, maybe she wasn't.
The situation bothered him considerably. Things happened frequently over here that wouldn't happen in the States once in a hundred years. Who could say that the two weren't in collusion? When a chap like Spurlock jumped the traces, cherchez la femme, every time. He hadn't gambled or played the horses or hit the booze back there in little old New York….
"Aw, piffle!" he said, half aloud and rather disgustedly, as he stepped out into the sunshine. "My old coco is disintegrating. I've bumped into so much of the underside that I can't see clean any more. No girl with a face like that…. And yet, dang it! I've seen 'em just as innocent looking that were prime vipers. Let's get to Hong-Kong, James, and hit the high spots while there is time."
He signalled to Ah Cum; and the two of them crossed on foot into the city.
It was not until the morning of the fifth day that the constant vigil was broken. The patient fell into a natural and refreshing sleep. So Ruth found that for a while her eyes were free. She tiptoed to the stand and gathered up the manuscripts which she carried to a chair by the window. Since the discovery of them, she had been madly eager to read these typewritten tales. Treasure caves to explore!
All through these trying days she had recurrently wondered what this strange young man would have to say that Dickens and Hugo had not already said. That was the true marvel of it. No matter how many books one read, each was different, as each human being was different. Some had the dignity and the aloofness of a rock in the sea; and others were as the polished pebbles on the sands—one saw the difference of pebble from pebble only by close scrutiny. Ruth, without suspecting it, had fallen upon a fundamental truth: that each and every book fitted into the scheme of human moods and intelligence.
Ruth was at that stage where the absorption of facts is great, but where the mental digestion is not quite equal to the task. She was acquiring truths, but in a series of shocks rather than by the process of analysis.
There were seven tales in all—short stories—a method of expression quite strange to her, after the immense canvases of Dickens and Hugo. When she had finished the first tale, there was a sense of disappointment. She had expected a love story; and love was totally absent. It was a tale of battle, murder, and sudden death on the New York waterfront. Sordid; but that was not Ruth's term for it; she had no precise commentary to offer.
From time to time she would come upon a line of singular beauty or a paragraph full of haunting music; and these would send her rushing on for something that never happened. Each manuscript was like the other: the same lovely treatment of an unlovely subject. Abruptly would come the end. It was as if she had come upon the beautiful marble façade of a fairy palace, was invited to enter, and behind the door—nothing.
She did not realize that she was offering criticisms. The word "criticism" had no concrete meaning to her then; no more than "compromise." Some innate sense of balance told her that something was wrong with these tales. She could not explain in words why they disappointed her or that she was disappointed.