THE room to which Judge Burnham presently escorted his bride was very unlike that parlor. As she looked about her, on the exquisite air of beauty which prevailed, and the evidences of refined and cultured taste, scattered with lavish hand, she was touched with the thought that her tastes had been understood and remembered, in each minute detail.

“How very lovely this is!” she said, as her foot rested on the soft velvet carpet, with its wildwood vines trailing in rich colors over the floor.

“I knew you would like it,” Judge Burnham said, with a gratified smile. “It reminded me of you, and, indeed, the entire room has seemed to me to be full of your presence. I enjoyed arranging it. I think I could have gratified your tastes in regard to the rest of the house, Ruth, if you had let me.”

“Oh, I know you could,” she answered, earnestly. “It was not that I did not trust your taste—and perhaps I made a mistake; but I meant it right, and you must help me to bring right out of it.”

She did not realize it, but this little concession to his possible better judgment helped her husband wonderfully.

“We will make it come right,” he said, decidedly. “And now I will leave you to rest a little, while I go down and discover whether this house is inhabited to-day.”

With the door closing after him seemed to go much of Ruth’s courage. This exquisite room was a rest to her beauty-loving eyes and heart. But it contrasted most strangely with the life below stairs; and, when she thought of that room below, it reminded her of all there was yet to meet and endure, and of the newness of the way, and the untried experiments which were to be made, and of her own weakness—and her heart trembled, and almost failed her. Yet it must not fail her; she must get strength.

Well for Ruth that she knew in what place to seek it. Instead of taking a seat in the delicately-carved and gracefully-upholstered easy-chair, which invited her into its depths, she turned and knelt before it. Perhaps, after all, there are more dangerous experiences than those which, in coming to a new home, to take up new responsibilities, lead us to feel our utter weakness, and bring us on our knees, crying to the strong for strength.

Judge Burnham’s entrance, nearly an hour afterward, found Ruth resting quietly in that easy chair, such a calm on her face, and such a light in her eyes, that he stopped on the threshold, and regarded her with a half-pleased, half-awed expression, as he said:

“You look wonderfully rested! I think my easy chair must be a success. Will you come down now, to a farm-house supper? Please don’t see any more of the strange things than you can help. I tried to get the girls to come up, and so avoid some of the horrors of a meeting below stairs; but they are too thoroughly alarmed to have any sense at all, and I had to abandon that plan.”

“Poor things!” said Ruth, compassionately. “Am I so very formidable? It must be dreadful to feel frightened at people. I can’t imagine the feeling.”

He surveyed her critically, then laughed. He had some conception of what a vision she would be to the people down-stairs. She had not changed her travelling dress, which was of rich dark silk, fitted exquisitely to her shapely form, and the soft laces at throat and wrist, brightened only by a knot of ribbon of the most delicate tint of blue, completed what, to Judge Burnham’s cultured taste, seemed the very perfection of a toilet.

“You do not frighten me,” he said. “I can manage to look at you without being overwhelmed. I shall not answer for anybody else. Ruth, I have obeyed you to the very letter. In a fit of something very like vexation, I resolved not to lift a finger to change the customs of the house, leaving you to see them, according to your desire, as they were. The result is we haven’t even a table to ourselves, to-night. The whole of that insufferable family, cat and all, are ready to gather, with us, around their hospitable board. I am sorry, now, that I was so very literal in my obedience.”

“I am not,” Ruth said, and her tone was quiet, and had a sound in it which was not there when he left her. It served to make him regard her again, curiously.

Then they went down-stairs to the kitchen! Ruth was presently seated at the long table, alarmingly near to the stove which had cooked the potatoes that graced the evening meal—boiled potatoes, served in their original coats! to be eaten with two-tined steel forks, the same forks expected to do duty in the mastication of a huge piece of peach-pie!—unless, indeed, she did as her husband’s daughters were evidently accustomed to doing, and ate it with her knife. There were, at that table, Farmer Ferris, in his shirt-sleeves, himself redolent of the barn and the cow-house; his wife, in a new, stiff, blue and red plaid calico, most manifestly donned to do honor to the occasion; two boys, belonging to the Ferris household, in different degrees of shock-headed, out-at-the-elbow disorder, and the aforesaid apparition in pink calico, the gray cat still hugged to her heart, and eating milk from the same saucer, at intervals; and, lastly, the two daughters of the House of Burnham.

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:

“For the land’s sake, girls! do go quick; I’m afraid he will bite you next time. I wonder if she is as awful cross as he is? She looks it, and more too.”

In the midst of all the tumult of thought which there might have been, Ruth found herself trying to determine which was the most objectional expression of the two, Mrs. Judge Erskine’s favorite “Land alive!” or Mrs. Ferris’ “For the land’s sake!” Where do Americans get their favorite expletives, anyway?

She had not much time to query, for here were these girls, sitting each on the edge of one of the solemn cane-seated chairs, and looking as thoroughly miserable as the most hard-hearted could have desired. What was she to say to them, or would it be more merciful to say nothing at all? Ruth felt an unutterable pity for them. How miserably afraid they were of their father! How entirely unnatural it seemed! And it could not be that he had ever been actually unkind to them? It was just a system of severe letting alone, combined with the unwisdom of the Ferris tongue which had developed such results. Between the intervals of trying to say a few words to them, words which they answered with solemn “Yes, ma’ams,” Ruth tried to study their personal appearance. It was far from prepossessing; yet, remembering Susan, and the marvelous changes which the “ivy-green dress,” fitted to her form, had accomplished, wondered how much of their painful awkwardness was due to the utter unsuitability of their attire, and the uncouth arrangement of their coiffures.

The elder of the two was tall and gaunt, with pale, reddish, yellow hair—an abundance of it, which she seemed to think served no purpose but to annoy her, and was to be stretched back out of the way as far and as tightly as possible. Her shoulders were bent and stooping; her pale, blue eyes looked as though, when they were not full of dismayed embarrassment, they were listless, and her whole manner betokened that of a person who was a trial to herself, and to every one with whom she came in contact.

People, with such forms and faces, almost invariably manage to fit themselves out in clothing which shows every imperfection to advantage. This girl was no exception; indeed, she seemed to have succeeded in making an exceptional fright of herself. Her dress was of the color and material which seemed to increase her height, and bore the marks of a novice in dress-making about every part of it. To increase the effect it was much too short for her, and showed to immense disadvantage a pair of strong, thick country boots, which might have been excellent for tramping over plowed ground in wet weather. The younger sister was a complete contrast in every respect. Her form can only be described by that expressive and not very elegant word “chunky.” From her thick, short hair, down to her thickly-shod feet, she seemed to be almost equally shapeless and graceless; fat, red cheeks; small, round eyes shining out from layers of fat; large, ill-shaped hands; remarkably large feet, apparently, or else her shoes were, and arrayed in a large plaided dress of red and green, which was much too low in the neck and much too short-waisted, and was absolutely uncouth! Swiftly, silently, Ruth took in all these details. And she took in, also, what her husband had never known—that a large portion of this uncouthness was due to the outward adornings or disguisings, which is what persons devoid of taste sometimes succeed in making of their dress.

In the midst of her musings there came to her a new idea. It dawned upon her in the form of a question. Why should she, a lady of fashion and of leisure, and of such cultured taste that she was an acknowledged authority among her friends, on all matters pertaining to the esthetic, be in so marked a manner, for the second time in her short life, brought face to face with that form of ill-breeding which troubled her the most? Not only face to face with it, but put in such a position that it was her duty to endure it patiently and show kindly interest in the victims? Was it possible? And this thought flashed upon her like a revelation—that she had been wont to make too much of this matter; that she had allowed the lack of culture in these directions to press her too sorely. Now, do you know that this was the first time such a possibility had dawned on Ruth Burnham? So insensible had been her yielding to the temptation which wealth and leisure brings, to give too much thought and too high a place to these questions of dress and taste, that, as I say, she had not been conscious of any sin in that direction, while those who looked on at her life had been able to see it plainly, and in exaggerated form!

I suspect, dear friend, that you, at this moment, are the victim of some inconsistency which your next-door neighbor sees plainly, and which, possibly, injures your influence over her, and you are not conscious of its development. Now, that is a solemn thought, as well as a perplexing one, for what is to be done about it? “Cleanse thou me from secret faults,” prayed the inspired writer. May he not have meant those faults so secret that it takes the voice of God to reveal them to our hearts?

At least to Ruth Burnham, sitting there in that high-backed rocker, looking at her husband’s daughters, the thought came like the voice of God’s Spirit in her heart. She had come very near to that revealing Spirit during the last two hours—rather he had made his presence known to her. She was in a hushed mood, desiring to be led, and she plainly saw that even this exhibition of uncouthness could be a discipline to her soul, if she would but allow its voice. You are not to understand that she, therefore, concluded uncouthness and utter disregard of refined tastes to be necessary outgrowths of Christian experience, or to be in the least necessary to a higher development of Christian life. She merely had a glimpse of what it meant, to be in a state of using this world as not abusing it. The thought quickened her resolutions in regard to those neglected girls thus thrown under her care, and, I have no doubt, that it toned her voice when she spoke to them. I believe it not irreverent to say that the very subject upon which she first addressed them was chosen for her, all unconsciously to herself, by that Ever-present Spirit, to whom nothing that an immortal soul can say, appears trivial, because he sees the waves of influence which are stirred years ahead by the quiet words.

Just what the two frightened girls expected from her would have been, perhaps, difficult for even themselves to explain. For years all their intercourse with their father had consisted in a series of irritated lectures, delivered in a sharp key, on his part, and received in a frightened silence by them. He had been utterly disappointed with them in every respect, and he had not failed to show it, and they had not failed to seek for sympathy by pouring the story of their grievances into Mrs. Ferris’ willing ears. The result was that she had but increased their terror in and doubt of their father. Added to this, she had all the ignorant superstition of her class in regard to step-mothers, if, indeed the views of this sort of people shall be called by no harsher name than superstition. The new-comer had been, during the last week, most freely discussed in the Ferris household, and the result had been what might have been expected. Therefore, it was with unfeigned amazement and with the demonstrations of prolonged stares, that Ruth’s first suddenly spoken sentence broke the silence which the others were feeling keenly.

“Your hair looks as though it would curl, naturally; did you ever try it?”

This to the elder girl, whose whole face reddened under the astonishment produced by the query, and who, as I said, could only stare for a moment. Then she said:

“Yes, ma’am, I did once; long time ago.”

“And didn’t you like the appearance?”

A more vivid blush and a conscious laugh was the answer. Then she added:

“Why, yes, well enough; but it was such a bother, and nobody to care.”

“Oh, it is very little trouble.” Mrs. Burnham answered, lightly, “when you understand just how to manage it. I think natural curls are beautiful.”