As soon as Beriah Sellers had bade his friends good night and seen them depart, he did not retire apartments in the Planter’s, but took his way to his lodgings with a friend in a distant part of the city.
CHAPTER XIV.
The letter that Philip Sterling wrote to Ruth Bolton, on the evening of setting out to seek his fortune in the west, found that young lady in her own father’s house in Philadelphia. It was one of the pleasantest of the many charming suburban houses in that hospitable city, which is territorially one of the largest cities in the world, and only prevented from becoming the convenient metropolis of the country by the intrusive strip of Camden and Amboy sand which shuts it off from the Atlantic ocean. It is a city of steady thrift, the arms of which might well be the deliberate but delicious terrapin that imparts such a royal flavor to its feasts.
It was a spring morning, and perhaps it was the influence of it that made Ruth a little restless, satisfied neither with the outdoors nor the indoors. Her sisters had gone to the city to show some country visitors Independence Hall, Girard College and Fairmount Water Works and Park, four objects which Americans cannot die peacefully, even in Naples, without having seen. But Ruth confessed that she was tired of them, and also of the Mint. She was tired of other things. She tried this morning an air or two upon the piano, sang a simple song in a sweet but slightly metallic voice, and then seating herself by the open window, read Philip’s letter. Was she thinking about Philip, as she gazed across the fresh lawn over the tree tops to the Chelton Hills, or of that world which his entrance, into her tradition-bound life had been one of the means of opening to her? Whatever she thought, she was not idly musing, as one might see by the expression of her face. After a time she took up a book; it was a medical work, and to all appearance about as interesting to a girl of eighteen as the statutes at large; but her face was soon aglow over its pages, and she was so absorbed in it that she did not notice the entrance of her mother at the open door.
“Ruth?”
“Well, mother,” said the young student, looking up, with a shade of impatience.
“I wanted to talk with thee a little about thy plans.”
“Mother; thee knows I couldn’t stand it at Westfield; the school stifled me, it’s a place to turn young people into dried fruit.”
“I know,” said Margaret Bolton, with a half anxious smile, “thee chafes against all the ways of Friends, but what will thee do? Why is thee so discontented?”
“If I must say it, mother, I want to go away, and get out of this dead level.”
With a look half of pain and half of pity, her mother answered, “I am sure thee is little interfered with; thee dresses as thee will, and goes where thee pleases, to any church thee likes, and thee has music. I had a visit yesterday from the society’s committee by way of discipline, because we have a piano in the house, which is against the rules.”
“I hope thee told the elders that father and I are responsible for the piano, and that, much as thee loves music, thee is never in the room when it is played. Fortunately father is already out of meeting, so they can’t discipline him. I heard father tell cousin Abner that he was whipped so often for whistling when he was a boy that he was determined to have what compensation he could get now.”
“Thy ways greatly try me, Ruth, and all thy relations. I desire thy happiness first of all, but thee is starting out on a dangerous path. Is thy father willing thee should go away to a school of the world’s people?”
“I have not asked him,” Ruth replied with a look that might imply that she was one of those determined little bodies who first made up her own mind and then compelled others to make up theirs in accordance with hers.
“And when thee has got the education thee wants, and lost all relish for the society of thy friends and the ways of thy ancestors, what then?”
Ruth turned square round to her mother, and with an impassive face and not the slightest change of tone, said,
“Mother, I’m going to study medicine?”
Margaret Bolton almost lost for a moment her habitual placidity.
“Thee, study medicine! A slight frail girl like thee, study medicine! Does thee think thee could stand it six months? And the lectures, and the dissecting rooms, has thee thought of the dissecting rooms?”
“Mother,” said Ruth calmly, “I have thought it all over. I know I can go through the whole, clinics, dissecting room and all. Does thee think I lack nerve? What is there to fear in a person dead more than in a person living?”
“But thy health and strength, child; thee can never stand the severe application. And, besides, suppose thee does learn medicine?”
“I will practice it.”
“Here?”
“Here.”
“Where thee and thy family are known?”
“If I can get patients.”
“I hope at least, Ruth, thee will let us know when thee opens an office,” said her mother, with an approach to sarcasm that she rarely indulged in, as she rose and left the room.
Ruth sat quite still for a time, with face intent and flushed. It was out now. She had begun her open battle.
The sight-seers returned in high spirits from the city. Was there any building in Greece to compare with Girard College, was there ever such a magnificent pile of stone devised for the shelter of poor orphans? Think of the stone shingles of the roof eight inches thick! Ruth asked the enthusiasts if they would like to live in such a sounding mausoleum, with its great halls and echoing rooms, and no comfortable place in it for the accommodation of any body? If they were orphans, would they like to be brought up in a Grecian temple?
And then there was Broad street! Wasn’t it the broadest and the longest street in the world? There certainly was no end to it, and even Ruth was Philadelphian enough to believe that a street ought not to have any end, or architectural point upon which the weary eye could rest.
But neither St. Girard, nor Broad street, neither wonders of the Mint nor the glories of the Hall where the ghosts of our fathers sit always signing the Declaration; impressed the visitors so much as the splendors of the Chestnut street windows, and the bargains on Eighth street. The truth is that the country cousins had come to town to attend the Yearly Meeting, and the amount of shopping that preceded that religious event was scarcely exceeded by the preparations for the opera in more worldly circles.
“Is thee going to the Yearly Meeting, Ruth?” asked one of the girls.
“I have nothing to wear,” replied that demure person. “If thee wants to see new bonnets, orthodox to a shade and conformed to the letter of the true form, thee must go to the Arch Street Meeting. Any departure from either color or shape would be instantly taken note of. It has occupied mother a long time, to find at the shops the exact shade for her new bonnet. Oh, thee must go by all means. But thee won’t see there a sweeter woman than mother.”
“And thee won’t go?”
“Why should I? I’ve been again and again. If I go to Meeting at all I like best to sit in the quiet old house in Germantown, where the windows are all open and I can see the trees, and hear the stir of the leaves. It’s such a crush at the Yearly Meeting at Arch Street, and then there’s the row of sleek-looking young men who line the curbstone and stare at us as we come out. No, I don’t feel at home there.”
That evening Ruth and her father sat late by the drawing-room fire, as they were