The Fifth Wheel

nd I need purifying. My wanderings disturb Lucy. She is always on the lookout for me, in

-picture of my life, dumped out in terrible confusion in Edith's sunke

s are as common a part of a girl's paraphernalia as a muff and a shopping-bag on a winter's day on Fifth Avenue. Lucy lives in a university town. The university i

beside a lake. Opposite the seat is an ecstatic little maple tree, at this season of the year flaunting all the pinks and reds and yellows of a fi

about me. She believed I was writing poetry! "And whenever a healthy, normal girl like Ruth begins to writ

oetry indeed! Good heaven

nd girl, not the timid, resigned type one usually thinks of when the term is used, but the kind that goes away to a fashionable boarding-school when she is sixteen, has an elaborate coming-out party two years later, and then proves herself either a success or a failure according to the number of invi

ery grand and elegant mansion and christened it The Homestead. Hilton used to be just a nice, typical New England city. It had its social ambitions and discontents, I suppose, but no more pronounced

ilton has had somewhat the same effect upon the people that it confines. If a social barrier of any sort appears upon the horizon of my sister-in-law Edith, she is never ha

inction, where it belonged, impressed me as a worthy ambition. I was glad to be used in Edith's operations. Even as a little girl something had rankled in my heart, too, when

hen the list of débutantes among our summer friends promised to be less distinguished. It happened that many of these débutantes lived in Boston in the winter, which isn't very far from Hilton, and Ed

e next morning's mail would not contain some cherished invitation or other. And when it did, and Edith came bearing it triumphantly up to my room, where I was being c

a point of having her luncheon and dinner guests take off their things in my room. I knew it was because of the invita

rything-schemes, plans and devices-all appeared to me as simply necessary parts of a big and difficult contest I had entered and must win. It never occurred to me then that my efforts were unadmirable. When at the end of my first season Edith and I discov

like me who have the advantage of mothers-tender and solicitous mothers too. But even mothers cannot keep their children from catching measles if

at school, because Edith impressed upon me that such accomplishments would be found convenient and convincing. I learned to swim and dive, play tennis and golf, ride horseback, dance and skate, simply because if I was efficient in sports I would prove popular

at was misleading. It almost deceived myself. At eighteen I had accepted as a sad truth the wickedness of the world, and especially that of men. I was very blasé, very resigned-at least the two top layers of me were. Down underneath, way down, I know now I wa

cceeded in piercing the fifty thousand dollar wrought-iron fence that surrounded the acres of Grassmere. We had never been honored by one of Mrs. F. Rockridge Sewall's heavily crested invitations. We had drunk tea in the same drawing-r

at any attempt to inveigle him into its society. Most of us had never met him, but we all knew him by sight. Frequently during the summer months he might be seen speeding along the wide state

d given me. It had been made at an expensive dressmaker's of hers in Boston. I remember my sister-in-law exclaimed as we strolled up the cedar-lined walk togethe

noon that I met B

on the dining-room table at old 240 Main Street. Suspended on a narrow white ribbon above the roses Edith had hu

in college at the time, were spending part of their vacation in Hilton; and my sister Lucy was there to

not too fast!" anxiou

G!" had ejaculated Oliver and

it," my sister Lucy in

"I met Mr. Sewall at a tea not long ago, as o

had sung out, "I'm proud of you, rascal! You're a wonder, you are! Listen, peopl