"I'll be busy with my studies daytimes and keep out of the way evenings. Really," she asked, "do you want me?"
"We really do," I said solemnly.
She turned and suddenly sat up beside me on the edge of the bed. She was a lovely creature with her long thick hair, her white arms, and her pretty, soft, beribboned nightgown falling off one shoulder. She seemed too lovely to be my sister. She flung one arm around my shoulders.
"Lucy," she exclaimed, "from this time on, I'm going to be nice to you."
I don't remember that Ruth had ever before put her arm around me of her own accord. A lump came in my throat. Tears blinded me. I got up hastily and began putting down the windows.
CHAPTER XXV
IF you want to know what became of Ruth I'll tell you—I'll tell you right off. She fell in love with Bob Jennings. She fell awfully in love with him—absorbingly, overwhelmingly in love. Ruth, the lofty, the high, the pedestalled! Ruth who prided herself on her coolness and her circumspection, Ruth who boasted that fate had foreordained a brilliant marriage, lost her head over a young college instructor who taught English composition to freshmen and sophomores, at a salary something less than three thousand a year. It simply proves that the eternal feminine will crop out, however much it has been choked and blighted, just like a dry bulb that's been kept in a damp dark cellar all winter. Once you put it in the sun and warmth, and give it a little water, it just can't help but grow up bright and green—brilliant rank green, full of juicy stalks and buds. Why, Ruth got to be such a normal sort of girl that she blushed every time Bob's name was mentioned. Ruth the invulnerable! She even lost her appetite—of all ordinary things—and great circles appeared under her eyes. The most astounding feature to me was that Ruth fell in love before she was asked to. Imagine that if you can. Ruth the haughty! The bulb began to send out shoots like a common onion or potato, before invited by the sun. Things came to such a pass that Will finally touched on the delicate subject with Bob. We thought the man must be blind, crazy or heartless, not to have seen the tell-tale symptoms in Ruth's manner long before circles began to appear. But Will found that Bob was simply penniless. This university pays salaries about large enough to keep two canaries alive, and Bob told Will that though he had loved Ruth ever since the day he first saw her, he couldn't say a word to her about it, because he already had a mother quite alone and dependent living with him, besides a sister he was trying to put through college, and he knew Ruth was a girl who had been used to luxuries.
Bob is a kind of dreamy sort of man. He says the simplest things in a way that thrills you. His letters, even his notes accepting dinner invitations (and such are the only kind I have ever received) have a kind of "way" with them—exclamation points here and there, single words, capitalised and perioded, to express a whole sentence. Oh, Bob is awfully individual; but he'll never be rich. He's a teacher, in the first place; and in the second, he hasn't a father with a fortune. When I realised that Ruth loved Bob Jennings, I was worried about those demands of that temperament of hers—the soft-footed, unobtrusive servants, the exquisite china, the fine lace, the dinners perfectly served, all those expensive things that Bob couldn't supply in a lifetime. If only Bob had had Breck's fortune, or Breck had had Bob's poetic soul, everything would have been all right; for I am sure Ruth would have eloped with Bob Jennings the first time he asked her.