The Coming of Bill | Page 7

and, if it had not been for Bailey, so Bailey
considered, Ruth would have been allowed to do just whatever she
pleased. There were those who said that this was precisely what she did,
despite Brother Bailey.
It is a hard world for a conscientious young man of twenty-seven.
Bailey paid the cab and went into the house. It was deliciously cool in
the hall, and for a moment peace descended on him. But the distant
sound of a piano in the upper regions ejected it again by reminding him
of his mission. He bounded up the stairs and knocked at the door of his
sister's private den.
The piano stopped as he entered, and the girl on the music-stool
glanced over her shoulder.
"Well, Bailey," she said, "you look warm."
"I am warm," said Bailey in an aggrieved tone. He sat down solemnly.
"I want to speak to you, Ruth."
Ruth shut the piano and caused the music-stool to revolve till she faced

him.
"Well?" she said.
Ruth Bannister was an extraordinarily beautiful girl, "a daughter of the
gods, divinely tall, and most divinely fair." From her mother she had
inherited the dark eyes and ivory complexion which went so well with
her mass of dark hair; from her father a chin of peculiar determination
and perfect teeth. Her body was strong and supple. She radiated health.
To her friends Ruth was a source of perplexity. It was difficult to
understand her. In the set in which she moved girls married young; yet
season followed season, and Ruth remained single, and this so
obviously of her own free will that the usual explanation of such a state
of things broke down as soon as it was tested.
In shoals during her first two seasons, and lately with less unanimity,
men of every condition, from a prince--somewhat battered, but still a
prince--to the Bannisters' English butler--a good man, but at the
moment under the influence of tawny port, had laid their hearts at her
feet. One and all, they had been compelled to pick them up and take
them elsewhere. She was generally kind on these occasions, but always
very firm. The determined chin gave no hope that she might yield to
importunity. The eyes that backed up the message of the chin were
pleasant, but inflexible.
Generally it was with a feeling akin to relief that the rejected, when
time had begun to heal the wound, contemplated their position. There
was something about this girl, they decided, which no fellow could
understand: she frightened them; she made them feel that their hands
were large and red and their minds weak and empty. She was waiting
for something. What it was they did not know, but it was plain that they
were not it, and off they went to live happily ever after with girls who
ate candy and read best-sellers. And Ruth went on her way, cool and
watchful and mysterious, waiting.
The room which Ruth had taken for her own gave, like all rooms when
intelligently considered, a clue to the character of its owner. It was the

only room in the house furnished with any taste or simplicity. The
furniture was exceedingly expensive, but did not look so. The key-note
of the colour-scheme was green and white. All round the walls were
books. Except for a few prints, there were no pictures; and the only
photograph visible stood in a silver frame on a little table.
It was the portrait of a woman of about fifty, square-jawed, tight-lipped,
who stared almost threateningly out of the frame; exceedingly
handsome, but, to the ordinary male, too formidable to be attractive. On
this was written in a bold hand, bristling with emphatic down-strokes
and wholly free from feminine flourish: "To my dear Ruth from her
Aunt Lora." And below the signature, in what printers call "quotes," a
line that was evidently an extract from somebody's published works:
"Bear the torch and do not falter."
Bailey inspected this photograph with disfavour. It always irritated him.
The information, conveyed to him by amused friends, that his Aunt
Lora had once described Ruth as a jewel in a dust-bin, seemed to him
to carry an offensive innuendo directed at himself and the rest of the
dwellers in the Bannister home. Also, she had called him a worm. Also,
again, his actual encounters with the lady, though few, had been
memorably unpleasant. Furthermore, he considered that she had far too
great an influence on Ruth. And, lastly, that infernal sentence about the
torch, which he found perfectly meaningless, had a habit of running in
his head like a catch-phrase, causing him the keenest annoyance.
He pursed his lips disapprovingly and averted his eyes.
"Don't sniff at Aunt Lora, Bailey," said Ruth. "I've had to speak to