did. The letter was curious:

“My dear child,” she had written, “by all means come to me in New York if your mother dies. But why anticipate? She’ll probably live for years. I hope so. To say I hope so sounds almost like a lack of hospitality and to send you an urgent invitation to come, under the circumstances, sounds—This is getting too complicated. Come whenever you need me, I’m always at home now.”

And the letter was signed with her full name, Gloria Mayfield. She had not even called Ruth niece, or signed herself “your loving aunt,” or anything that might be reasonably expected.

Ruth might have lingered on at home, but she had refused the hospitality of her mother’s friends and the house was empty and desolate and she was dressed in black. She hadn’t wanted to dress in black, but she hadn’t the courage to shock people by continuing to wear colours, so she hurriedly finished all the ghastly business that some one must always finish after a funeral, and then she packed her trunks, putting in all the pictures and books that she liked best, and took a train for New York. She had a plan in the back of her mind about a studio there. She had never seen a real studio, but she had read about them, and if Aunt Gloria proved disagreeable, she would go and live in one. She wondered a bit what sort of a place Aunt Gloria lived in. The address sounded aristocratic and sort of English, Gramercy Square. She liked the sound of it.

Her mother’s death had hurt her cruelly, but she was so young that already she was beginning to rebound. The journey helped to revive her spirits. Everything interested her, but her first sight of New York disappointed her vaguely. If she had known, her disappointment was caused only because the cab driver took her down Fourth Avenue instead of Fifth, and there was little to interest her in the dull publishing buildings and wholesale houses, and she missed even the shabby green of Madison Square. Her spirits rose a bit when the cab turned into Gramercy Square. All the fresh greenness of it, the children playing within the iron-barred enclosure, the old-fashioned houses and clubs and the big, new apartment buildings looking so clean and quiet in the morning sunlight, appealed to her. She rather expected the cab to stop before one of the apartment houses, but instead it stopped on the north side of the park. Her aunt lived in a house then. This was also cheering. The cab driver carried her bag for her up the high steps and she rang the bell with a fast-beating heart. She didn’t know exactly what she had expected—perhaps that Aunt Gloria would open the door in person—and she started back when it was opened by a tall negro who looked as startled as herself.

“Is Aunt Gloria—is Miss Mayfield at home?”

“Are you expected?”

He spoke in a soft, precise voice unlike the voice of any nigger Ruth had ever heard before. She knew he must be a servant though he was not in livery, and she looked at him as she answered, suddenly impressed by his regular features, his straight hair, and yellow-brown skin.

“She didn’t know exactly when I’d come, but she knew I was coming. I am her niece.”

The servant picked up her bag, which the cab driver had left beside her and opened the door wider for her to come in.

“Miss Mayfield is at home. I’ll let her know that you are here if you will wait a few moments.”

She was in a wide hall now from which an open staircase rose to rooms above. The hall was very cheerful with white woodwork and grey walls hung with etchings in narrow black frames. Uninvited Ruth perched hesitatingly on the edge of a Chippendale chair and waited. The coloured man walked to the far end of the hall, opened a door there and called:

“Amy, come here, you.”

Amy came, a round, short, black woman of the type most familiar to Ruth.

To her the man evidently explained the situation, but his soft voice did not carry to Ruth’s end of the hall; not so the voice of Amy. Ruth could hear her replies quite plainly.

“Mis’ Mayfiel’ a’n yit had her breakfus’—I’se jes now makin’ de tray—ef you sez so I’ll tell her, but dis a’n no hour to be talkin’ to Mis’ Mayfiel’.”

Both Amy and the man disappeared through the door and soon Amy emerged again carrying a breakfast tray. She went past Ruth and up the stairs. Ruth was growing impatient and rather offended. Of course she should have sent a wire, but even so, Gloria Mayfield was her aunt and she should have been taken to her at once. Evidently her aunt ate breakfast in bed. Perhaps she was an invalid like her mother. Ruth hoped not. Evidently too she had a lot more money than Ruth had supposed. Her impatience was not alleviated when Amy came down the stairs again without speaking to her. It was unbearable that she should sit here in the hall of her aunt’s house, ignored like a book agent. In another moment the man had reappeared.

“Miss Mayfield will see you as soon as she can dress, Miss, and would you like breakfast in your room or downstairs?”

He had picked up Ruth’s bag as he spoke.

“I’ve had breakfast,” said Ruth. She had indeed eaten breakfast in Grand Central Station. It was only seven o’clock in the morning when she arrived in New York, and that had seemed rather an early hour for even a relative to drop into her aunt’s home unexpectedly.

She followed the servant up the stairs, mentally commenting on how she hated “educated niggers.” Yet she had to admit there was nothing disrespectful in his manner. He set her bag down in one of the rooms opening out of the circular landing and asked for her trunk checks, and suggested sending Amy up to make her comfortable. She gave him the trunk checks, refused the offer of Amy’s help, and when he had closed the door sat down to examine her surroundings and wait for the appearance of her aunt.

There had been a certain charm about the entrance hall and stairway of the house, but the room in which she found herself was as uninteresting as possible. It was large and high-ceiled and almost empty and streamers of loosened and discoloured wall paper hung from the walls. It was in the rear of the house. The few essential pieces of furniture in the room made it look even larger than it really was. It looked like what it was, a very much unused bedroom in a house very much too large for its inhabitants. She walked to the window and looked out, but the view did not interest her. It was only of the rear of the houses on Twenty-second Street. The house opposite had a tiny back garden that ran out to meet a similar back garden in the rear of her aunt’s house. Ruth did not call this plot of ground a garden, because it had nothing growing in it except one stunted, twisted tree on the branches of which September had left a dozen pale green leaves. It made her think of an anæmic slum child. Looking at it Ruth felt suddenly very sad and neglected. She had hoped that her aunt would not be too much like a relative, but now she began to persuade herself that she had looked forward to the embracing arms of a motherly aunt, and her cold reception had quite broken her heart. Instead of a fussy, motherly relative she had found a cold, selfish woman living in a house much too large, surrounded by servants—Ruth had only seen two but there were probably more. She was unwelcome; she had been shoved off into the shabbiest room in the house by an insolent servant. But she was not a pauper. She would tell her aunt very coldly that she had only come to pay her respects and was going immediately to an hotel.

“Oh no, Aunt Gloria; I couldn’t think of imposing on you,” she could hear herself saying, and of course then her aunt would urge her to stay, but she wouldn’t. What could her aunt do in such a big house? It was four floors and a basement. It must be full of shabby, unused rooms like this one. Just then there was a knock at the door, and she hadn’t even smoothed her hair or powdered her nose as she had intended doing before her aunt sent for her.

“Come in,” she said. Her voice sounded husky and unused. The words were scarcely out of her mouth when the door opened and a woman swept into the room—the tallest woman she had ever seen, at least six feet tall and slender without being thin—a graceful tiger lily of a woman with masses of auburn hair and big grey, black-lashed eyes and a straight white nose and a crushed flower of a mouth. With one hand she was holding a gorgeous, nameless garment of amber silk and lace and the other hand was held out to Ruth. Even as she took it Ruth realized that it would have been preposterous to have expected the goddess to kiss her.

“I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting—Ruth,” she said. Her voice was like silver bells ringing.

“I should have wired,” admitted Ruth. Her voice sounded flat and toneless after hearing her aunt speak.

“It would have been awkward if I hadn’t happened to be in town, but I was, so it’s all right. You’re older than I thought, I was afraid that you’d turn out a little girl.”

“And you’re ever so much younger than I thought, Aunt Gloria,” said Ruth, beginning to gain her composure.

“Thirty-five last birthday,” said her aunt.

Immediately Ruth realized that thirty-five was the only possible age for a woman. To be older or younger than thirty-five was infinitely dull. She herself at nineteen, which only a few moments ago she had considered a very interesting age indeed, was quite hopeless.

“But come, we mustn’t stay in this awful room. I didn’t tell George just where to take you. Certainly not here. I’ll have a room fixed up for you. Did George send for your trunks? He said you’d had breakfast, but that can’t be true—coffee perhaps, but not breakfast—I only had coffee myself. So we can eat together while they’re getting a room ready for you.” She was sweeping Ruth along with her down the stairs as she talked, not waiting for answers to anything she said. At the foot she turned and opened a door at the left of the staircase and peered in.

“Too gloomy in the dining-room in the morning. We’ll go in here,” and she turned to the other side, opening a door into a big room, all furnished in soft grey and dull gold. Ruth’s artist eye perceived how such a neutral-tinted background was just the thing to enhance the colourful appearance and personality of her aunt. The only touch of vivid colour in the room was in the hangings at the deep, high windows that looked out on the park.

“Have Amy bring our breakfast in here,” said Gloria, and then Ruth saw that George was standing in the doorway of the room they had just entered, though she had not heard her aunt call him. Later she observed the same thing many times, that George always appeared as if by magic and seemingly without being called whenever her aunt wanted him.

The room was full of comfortable, low, cushioned chairs, and seated on two of them with a table between, on which George had laid a white cloth, Ruth and her aunt Gloria gave each other that full scrutiny which surprise and embarrassment had previously denied them.

Ruth could see now that her aunt was not really so young as she had at first appeared. There were fine lines around her large eyes and art, not nature had painted her lashes black. Her fine brows had been “formed” and there were little, pale freckles gleaming on her white nose and across her long, cleanly moulded hands. Ruth saw all these things and they only strengthened her belief that Aunt Gloria was the most beautiful and charming woman in the world. She hoped very much that her aunt would like her, but she was not sanguine about it. She tried to tell herself that this woman was only her father’s sister, but it was hard to believe.

“Now, tell me all about it,” said Gloria.

“There’s very little to tell. Mother died on the tenth—your letter arrived on the same day. Of course it wasn’t unexpected. She had been an invalid for almost ten years, so it wasn’t a shock. I was the only relative at the funeral, but Mother had ever so many friends—”

She paused, wondering if she ought to tell Aunt Gloria about the flowers, the Eastern Star wreath, and—

“I don’t mean that,” Gloria interrupted her thoughts. “I mean how your mother happened to suggest that you come here. You know Jack’s wife didn’t approve of me—refused to meet me even, and I can’t understand. Was there some sort of deathbed forgiveness, or what?”

There was the faintest trace of mockery in her voice, but somehow Ruth could not be angry, though she knew that this woman, her father’s sister, was laughing at her dead mother and her dead mother’s conventions and moralities. She decided that she would be as frank as her aunt.

“No, Aunt Gloria, I don’t think Mother’s views had changed at all. She sent me here because you are my only living relative and she thought I was too young to live alone—and I came,” she continued bravely, “because New York is the best place in America to study art and I want to be a great painter. But if you don’t want me here I’ll live alone—I have money you know, and Mother intended that I should pay my own way.”

“I understand,” said Gloria, nodding. “That would be in character—a sort of blood is stronger than Bohemia idea.”

“And then,” continued Ruth, determined to be absolutely frank, “I think Mother was under the impression that you were older than you are, and had settled down—you have retired from the stage?”

Again Gloria laughed.

“My dear child, I’ve done nothing but retire from the stage ever since I first went on it, but that doesn’t matter. I agree with your mother that you will be much better off here with me than alone, and I shall be very glad to have you—it means one more permanent resident in this huge barn of a house. Only please don’t call me Aunt. Call me Gloria. My being your aunt is more or less of an accident. The fact that I like you is of vastly more importance, and if you like me we shall get on very well together.”

“I think you’re wonderful,” admitted Ruth, blushing deeply.

“Very well, then, you shall stay here—you can have two rooms or more if you want ’em, fixed up to suit yourself, and you can spend your income on your clothes and your education—but you will be here as my guest, not as my relative. I dislike relatives inordinately—don’t you?”

Without giving Ruth time to reply she went on:

“Have you thought about where you’re going to study?”

“No; I suppose there are a number of places.”

“There are, of course; the Art Students’ League is one of the best. The associations there should be good. You’ll be working with the strugglers. How old are you?”

“Nineteen.”

“Nineteen and the whole world before you, work and failure and success and New York and Paris and your first love affair—you’re young and you don’t have to nibble at the loaf; you can take big, hungry bites, and when the time for nibbling does come, you’ll have a banquet to remember.”

“Where is the Art Students’ League?” asked Ruth.

Her aunt fascinated her; she talked “like a book,” Ruth thought, but Ruth herself was practical despite her dreaming and the talk of art schools interested her.

“Oh, it’s a school with small fees—if you have a lot of talent they give scholarships—I don’t really know much about it, except that it’s on Fifty-seventh Street some place, and that it is supposed to be proper and good. You might try it for a year—then you’ll probably be wanting Paris. In another year I may feel old enough to chaperon you.”

After breakfast they went through the house, planning where Ruth should establish herself, finally deciding on two rooms on the fourth floor, because one of them had a skylight and could be used as a studio, where Ruth could work undisturbed.

The next few days were spent in buying furniture, in having the rooms redecorated, and in becoming familiar with New York.

Ruth was determined not to be impressed by anything, a determination that led Gloria Mayfield to suspect that her niece was of a phlegmatic temperament, and to wonder why she wanted to be an artist. Only the quiet sense of humour that Ruth displayed at rare intervals, encouraged her to believe that having her niece with her might not be a bad arrangement.

Ruth on her part discovered that her Aunt Gloria had a wide and varied circle of friends and no particularly well-defined scheme of existence. And she discovered a little of Gloria Mayfield’s past, the past that had been so shrouded in mystery in her mother’s house. It was when Ruth had made a remark about her aunt living alone in such a large house.

“Yes, it is large, but what am I to do?” said Gloria. “My second husband wished it on me and my third was kind enough to settle enough income on me to pay the taxes, and there you are. Of course I could let it to some one else, but it’s nice to have a lot of room.”

Ruth could not disguise her shock and astonishment.

“Oh, didn’t you know?” asked Gloria, smiling cheerfully.

“I didn’t know you’d been married at all,” said Ruth.

“Only once, really—the others were almost too casual. I supposed your mother had told you.”

“Did they die?” asked Ruth.

“Not to my knowledge—I never killed any of them,” said Gloria.

And Ruth put this conversation away in the back of her brain for future reference, along with several dozen other things that she didn’t exactly understand.