Those daughters! The strongest emotion which Ruth found it in her heart to have for them, on this first evening, was pity. She had never imagined anything like the painful embarrassment which they felt. They sat on the edges of their chairs, and, when engaged in trying to eat, tilted the chairs forward to reach their plates, and rested their elbows on the table to stare, when they dared to raise their frightened eyes to do so. Their father had performed the ceremony of introduction in a way which was likely to increase their painful self-consciousness. “Girls,” he had said, and his voice sounded as if he were summoning them to a trial by jury; “this is Mrs. Burnham.” And they had stood up, and essayed to make little bobbing courtesies, after the fashion of fifty years ago, until further pressed by Mrs. Ferris, who had said, with a conscious laugh:
“For the land’s sake, girls! do go and shake hands with her. Why, she is your ma now.”
But Judge Burnham’s haughty voice had come to the rescue:
“If you please, we will excuse them from that ceremony, Mrs. Ferris,” he had said. “Mrs. Burnham, please be seated.” And he had drawn back her chair with the courtesy of a gentleman and the inward fury of a lion. In truth, Judge Burnham was ashamed of and angry with himself, and I am glad of it; he deserved to be. Instead of asserting his authority, and making this meeting and this first meal together strictly a family matter, and managing a dozen other little details which he could have managed, and which would have helped wonderfully, he had angrily resolved to let everything utterly alone, and bring Ruth thus sooner and more decisively to seeing the folly, and the utter untenableness of her position. But something in the absolute calm of her face, this evening—a calm which had come to her since he left her in their room alone—made him feel it to be more than probable that she would not easily, nor soon, abandon the position which she had assumed.
The ordeal of supper was gotten through with easier than Ruth had supposed possible—though truth to tell, the things which would have affected most persons the least, were the hardest for her to bear. She had not entirely risen above the views concerning refinement which she had expressed during the early days of Chautauqua life; and to eat with a knife when a fork should be used, and to have a two-tined steel fork, instead of a silver one, and to have no napkin at all, were to her positive and vivid sources of discomfort—sources from which she could not altogether turn away, even at this time. I am not sure, however, that, in the trivialities, she did not lose some of the real trials which the occasion certainly presented.
Directly after the supper was concluded, with but a very poor attempt at eating on Ruth’s part, Judge Burnham led the way to that dreadful parlor, interposing his stern voice between the evident intention of the daughters to remain in the kitchen:
“I desire that you will come immediately to the parlor.”
As for Ruth and himself, they did not retreat promptly enough to escape Mrs. Ferris’ stage-whisper: