Of the four it was Carl who seemed to have the greatest interest in religions. He blurted out such monologues as, "I wonder if it isn't pure egotism that makes a person believe that the religion he is born to is the best? My country, my religion, my wife, my business—we think that whatever is ours is necessarily sacred, or, in other words, that we are gods—and then we call it faith and patriotism! The Hindu or the Christian is equally ready to prove to you—and mind you, he may be a wise old man with a beard—that his national religion is obviously the only one. Find out what you yourself really do think, and if you turn out a Sun-worshiper or a Hard-shell Baptist, why, good luck. If you don't think for yourself, then you're admitting that your theory of happiness is the old dog asleep in the sun. And maybe he is happier than the student. But I think you like to experiment with life."
His arguments were neither original nor especially logical; they were largely given to him by Bone Stillman, Professor Frazer, and chance paragraphs in stray radical magazines. But to Ruth, politely reared in a house with three maids, where it was as tactless to discuss God as to discuss sex, his defiances seemed terrifyingly new.... She was not the first who had complacently gone to church after reading Bernard Shaw.... But she did try to follow Carl's loose reasoning; to find out what she thought and what the spiritual fashions of her neighborhood made her think she thought.
The process gave her many anxious hours of alternating impatience with fixed religious dogmas, and loneliness for the comfortable refuge of a personal God, whose yearning had spoken to her in the Gregorian chant. She could never get herself to read more than two chapters of any book on the subject, nor did she get much light from conversation. One set of people supposed that Christianity had so entirely disappeared from intelligent circles that it was not worth discussion; another set supposed that no one but cranks ever thought of doubting the essentials of Christianity, and that, therefore, it was not worth discussion; and to a few superb women whom she knew, their religion was too sweet a reality to be subjected to the noisy chatter of discussion. Gradually Ruth forgot to think often of the matter, but it was always back in her mind.
They were happy, Carl and Ruth. To their flat came such of Ruth's friends as she kept because she liked them for themselves, with a fantastic assortment of personages and awkward rovers whom the ex-aviator knew. The Ericsons made an institution of "bruncheon"—breakfast-luncheon—at which coffee and eggs and deviled kidneys, a table of auction bridge and a davenport of talk and a wing-chair of Sunday papers, were to be had on Sunday morning from ten to one. At bruncheon Walter MacMonnies told to Florence Crewden his experiences in exploring Southern Greenland by aeroplane with the Schliess-Banning expedition. At bruncheon Bobby Winslow, now an interne, talked baseball with Carl. At bruncheon Phil Dunleavy regarded cynically all the people he did not know and played piquet in a corner with Ruth's father.
Carl and Ruth joined the Peace Waters Country Club, and in the spring of 1914 went there nearly every Saturday afternoon for tennis and a dance. Carl refused golf, however; he always repeated a shabby joke about the shame of taking advantage of such a tiny ball.
He seemed content to stick to office, home, and tennis-court. It was Ruth who planned their week-end trips, proposed at 8 a.m. Saturday, and begun at two that afternoon. They explored the tangled rocks and woods of Lloyd's Neck, on Long Island, sleeping in an abandoned shack, curled together like kittens. They swooped on a Dutch village in New Jersey, spent the night with an old farmer, and attended the Dutch Reformed church. They tramped from New Haven to Hartford, over Easter. Carl was always ready for their gipsy journeys; he responded to Ruth's visions of foaming South Sea isles; but he rarely sketched such pictures himself. He had given all of himself to joy in Ruth. Like many men called "adventurers," he was ready for anything but content with anything.
It was Ruth who was finding new voyages. She kept up her settlement work and progressed to an active interest in the Women's Trade Union League and took part in picketing during a Panama Hat-Workers' strike. She may have had more curiosity than principle, but she did badger policemen pluckily. She was studying Italian, the Montessori method, cooking. She taught new dishes to her maid. She adopted a careless suggestion of Carl and voluntarily increased the maid's salary, thereby shaking the rock-ribbed foundations of Upper West Side society.
In nothing did she find greater satisfaction than in being neither "the bride" nor "the little woman" nor any like degrading thing which recently married girls are by their sentimental spinster friends expected to be. She did not whisper the intimate details of her honeymoon to other young married women; she did not run about quaintly and tinily telling her difficulties with household work.
When a purring, baby-talking acquaintance gurgled: "How did the Ruthie bride spend her morning? Did she cook some little dainty for her husband? Nothing bourgeois, I'm sure!" in reply Ruth pleasantly observed: "Not a chance. The Ruthie bride cussed out the janitor for not shooting up a dainty cabbage on the dumb-waiter, and then counted up her husband's cigarette coupons and skipped right down to the premium parlors with 'em and got him a pair of pale-blue Boston garters and a cunning granite-ware stew-pan, and then sponged lunch off Olive Dunleavy. But nothing bourgeois!"