She followed the servant up the stairs, mentally commenting on how she hated “educated niggers.” Yet she had to admit there was nothing disrespectful in his manner. He set her bag down in one of the rooms opening out of the circular landing and asked for her trunk checks, and suggested sending Amy up to make her comfortable. She gave him the trunk checks, refused the offer of Amy’s help, and when he had closed the door sat down to examine her surroundings and wait for the appearance of her aunt.
There had been a certain charm about the entrance hall and stairway of the house, but the room in which she found herself was as uninteresting as possible. It was large and high-ceiled and almost empty and streamers of loosened and discoloured wall paper hung from the walls. It was in the rear of the house. The few essential pieces of furniture in the room made it look even larger than it really was. It looked like what it was, a very much unused bedroom in a house very much too large for its inhabitants. She walked to the window and looked out, but the view did not interest her. It was only of the rear of the houses on Twenty-second Street. The house opposite had a tiny back garden that ran out to meet a similar back garden in the rear of her aunt’s house. Ruth did not call this plot of ground a garden, because it had nothing growing in it except one stunted, twisted tree on the branches of which September had left a dozen pale green leaves. It made her think of an anæmic slum child. Looking at it Ruth felt suddenly very sad and neglected. She had hoped that her aunt would not be too much like a relative, but now she began to persuade herself that she had looked forward to the embracing arms of a motherly aunt, and her cold reception had quite broken her heart. Instead of a fussy, motherly relative she had found a cold, selfish woman living in a house much too large, surrounded by servants—Ruth had only seen two but there were probably more. She was unwelcome; she had been shoved off into the shabbiest room in the house by an insolent servant. But she was not a pauper. She would tell her aunt very coldly that she had only come to pay her respects and was going immediately to an hotel.
“Oh no, Aunt Gloria; I couldn’t think of imposing on you,” she could hear herself saying, and of course then her aunt would urge her to stay, but she wouldn’t. What could her aunt do in such a big house? It was four floors and a basement. It must be full of shabby, unused rooms like this one. Just then there was a knock at the door, and she hadn’t even smoothed her hair or powdered her nose as she had intended doing before her aunt sent for her.
“Come in,” she said. Her voice sounded husky and unused. The words were scarcely out of her mouth when the door opened and a woman swept into the room—the tallest woman she had ever seen, at least six feet tall and slender without being thin—a graceful tiger lily of a woman with masses of auburn hair and big grey, black-lashed eyes and a straight white nose and a crushed flower of a mouth. With one hand she was holding a gorgeous, nameless garment of amber silk and lace and the other hand was held out to Ruth. Even as she took it Ruth realized that it would have been preposterous to have expected the goddess to kiss her.
“I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting—Ruth,” she said. Her voice was like silver bells ringing.
“I should have wired,” admitted Ruth. Her voice sounded flat and toneless after hearing her aunt speak.
“It would have been awkward if I hadn’t happened to be in town, but I was, so it’s all right. You’re older than I thought, I was afraid that you’d turn out a little girl.”
“And you’re ever so much younger than I thought, Aunt Gloria,” said Ruth, beginning to gain her composure.
“Thirty-five last birthday,” said her aunt.
Immediately Ruth realized that thirty-five was the only possible age for a woman. To be older or younger than thirty-five was infinitely dull. She herself at nineteen, which only a few moments ago she had considered a very interesting age indeed, was quite hopeless.