There came the indeterminate year when Ruhannah finished school and
there was no money available to send her elsewhere for further
embellishment, no farther horizon than the sky over the Gayfield
hills, no other perspective than the main street of Gayfield with the
knitting mill at the end of it.
So into Gayfield Mill the girl walked, and found a place immediately
among the unskilled. And her career appeared to be predetermined now,
and her destiny a simple one--to work, to share the toil and the
gaieties of Gayfield with the majority of the other girls she knew; to
marry, ultimately, some boy, some clerk in one of the Gayfield stores,
some farmer lad, perhaps, possibly a school teacher or a local lawyer
or physician, or possibly the head of some department in the mill, or
maybe a minister--she was sufficiently well bred and educated for any
one of these.
* * * * *
The winter of her seventeenth year found her still very much a child
at heart, physically backward, a late adolescent, a little shy,
inclined to silences, romantic, sensitive to all beauty, and
passionately expressing herself only when curled up by the stove with
her pencil and the red light of the coals falling athwart the slim
hand that guided it.
She went sometimes to village parties, learned very easily to dance,
had no preferences among the youths of Gayfield, no romances. For
that matter, while she was liked and even furtively admired, her
slight shyness, reticence, and a vague, indefinite something about her
seemed to discourage familiar rustic gallantry. Also, she was as thin
and awkward as an overgrown lad, not thought to be pretty, known to be
poor. But for all that more than one young man was vaguely haunted at
intervals by some memory of her grey eyes and the peculiar sweetness
of her mouth, forgetting for the moment several freckles on the
delicate bridge of her nose and several more on her sun-tanned
cheeks.
She had an agreeable time that winter, enchanted to learn dancing,
happy at "showers" and parties, at sleigh rides and "chicken suppers,"
and the various species of village gaiety which ranged from moving
pictures every Thursday and Saturday nights to church entertainments,
amateur theatricals at the town hall, and lectures under the auspices
of the aristocratic D. O. F.--Daughters of the Old Frontier.
But she never saw any boy she preferred to any other, never was
conscious of being preferred, excepting once--and she was not quite
certain about that.
It was old Dick Neeland's son, Jim--vaguely understood to have been
for several years in Paris studying art--and who now turned up in
Gayfield during Christmas week.