I DO not know that I need even try to tell you about the succession of petty trials and embarrassments that haunted Ruth Erskine’s way during the next few days. They belonged to that class of trials hard to endure—so hard, indeed, that at times the spirit shrinks away in mortal terror, and feels that it can bear no more; and yet in the telling to a listener they dwindle in importance. As for Ruth, she did not tell them—she lived them.
Everything was so new; nothing in or about the house could go on according to the old fashion; and yet there was no new fashion shaped. She saw many a thing which she must not do, and but few things that seemed to bear doing. She must stop in the act of ordering dinner, and remember in confusion that it was not her business to order dinners in this house any more. And yet she must remember that the nominal mistress seemed to know no more about ordering dinners for a family of eight than she knew about ten thousand other things that were waiting for her attention. Poor Ruth struggled and groaned and wondered, and rarely cried, but grew paler, if possible, than before, and her forehead was continually drawn, either with lines of pain or of intense self-suppression. She congratulated herself that her father escaped some of the misery. He went early to his office, shutting the door on the incongruous elements in his household with a sense of relief, and going out into the business world, where everything and everybody were as usual, and returning late, giving as little time to the home puzzle as possible. Yet it wore on him. Ruth could see that, and it but increased her burden to feel that the struggle she made to help was so manifest a struggle, and was, in some sense, a failure.
He detained her one morning in the library, with that special word of detention which as yet he had never applied to any one but her.
“My daughter, let me see you a moment before I go out. Do you think we ought to try to have some friends come in, in a social way?”
At this question Ruth stood aghast. Her father’s friends had hitherto not been hard for her to entertain—lawyers, judges, professional men of different degrees of prominence, often without their wives, and when the ladies were included they were of an age, as a rule, to expect little in the way of entertainment from Ruth, except a gracious attention to their comfort; so that, beyond very careful directions issued to very competent servants, and a general outlook on the perfected arrangements, little had been expected of her. But now it was different; other than professional people would expect invitations; and besides, the hostess was no hostess at all—would not know what to do—and, what was infinitely more painful, what not to do.
No wonder that Ruth was appalled over this new duty looming before her. Yet of course it was a duty; she flushed over the thought that her father had been obliged to suggest it. Of course people were expecting introductions; of course they would call—hosts of them. How much better it would be to have a gathering of a few friends before the great world pounced in upon them, so they might feel that at least with a few the ordeal of introduction was over.
“I don’t mean a large party,” her father hastened to explain. “Just a few friends—not professional ones, you know, but some of your new acquaintances in the church, perhaps. I thought you might like to have a gathering somewhat like that which you told me of at our little friend, Flossy Shipley’s.”