The Fifth Wheel Part 16

"Will you put that down, please," requested Tom.

"Certainly," Ruth smiled over-obligingly and laid the paper-cutter on the table. She folded her arms and began tapping the rug with her toe.

She was almost insolent.

"Well, then--what are your plans?" fired Tom at her with an obvious effort to control himself.

"New York," she announced mysteriously.

"Oh, New York!" repeated Tom. It was a scornful voice. "New York! And what do you intend to do in New York?"

"Oh, I don't know. I haven't decided. Something," she said airily.

"Ruth," said Tom, "please listen to me carefully if you can for a minute. We've always given you a pretty loose rein. Haven't we?"

Ruth shrugged her shoulders.

"You've had every advantage; attended one of the most expensive schools in this country; had all the money you required, coming-out party and all that; pleasures, flattery, attention--everything to make a girl contented. You've visited any one you pleased from one end of the United States to the other; traveled in Europe, Florida--anywhere you wanted; come and gone at will. Nothing to handicap you. Nothing hard. Nothing difficult. You'll agree. And what have you done with your advantages?

_What_--I want to know?"

Ruth shrugged her shoulders again.

"You can't blame any one but yourself. You haven't been interfered with.

I believed in letting you run your own affairs. Thought you were made of the right stuff to do it creditably. I was mistaken. You've had a fair trial at your own management and you've failed to show satisfactory results. Now _I'm_ going to step in. _I'm_ going to see if _I_ can save you from this drifting about and getting nowhere. I don't ask you to go back and anchor with Robert Jennings again. I'm shocked to confess that I don't believe you're worthy of a man like Jennings. It is no small thing to be decided carelessly or frivolously--this matter of marriage.

Engaged to two men inside of one year, and now both affairs broken off.

It's disgraceful! You've got to learn somehow or other that although you are a woman, you're not especially privileged to go back on decisions."

"I don't want to be especially privileged," said Ruth, and then she added, "special privileges would not be expected by women, if they were given equal rights."

"Oh, Suffrage!!!" exclaimed Tom with three exclamation points. "So that's it! That's at the bottom of all this trouble."

"That's at the bottom of it," suddenly put in my husband, emphatically.

"Oh, I see. Well, first, Ruth, you're to drop all that nonsense.

Suffrage indeed! What do _you_ know about it? You ought to be married and taking care of your own babies, and you wouldn't be disturbed by all these crazy-headed fads, invented by dissatisfied and unoccupied females. Suffrage! And perhaps you think that this latest exhibition of your changeableness and vacillation is an argument in favor of it."

"You needn't throw women's vacillation in their faces, Tom," replied Ruth calmly. "Stable decisions are matters of training and education.

Girls of my acquaintance lack the experience with the business world.

They don't come in contact with big transactions. They're guarded from them. A lawyer does the thinking for a woman of property oftentimes, and so, of course, women do not learn the necessity of precise statements, accurate thought, and all that. From the time a girl is old enough to think she knows she is just a girl, who her family hope will grow up to be pretty and attractive and marry well. If her family believed she was to grow up into a responsible citizen who would later control by her vote all sorts of weighty questions that affect taxes and tariffs and things, they would have to devote more thought to making her intelligent, because it would have an effect upon their individual interests. I'm interested in suffrage, Tom, not for the good it is going to do politics, but for the good it's going to do women."

Tom made an exclamation of disgust. He was beside himself with scorn and disapproval.

"Nonsense! Utter rot! Women were made to marry and be mothers. Women were----"

"But we'd be better mothers," Ruth cut in. "Don't you see, if----"

"Oh, I don't want to discuss suffrage," interrupted Tom; "I want to discuss your life. Let's keep to the subject. I want to see you settled and happy some day, and as I'm so much older than you, you must put yourself into my hands, and cheerfully. First, drop suffrage. Drop it.

Good Lord, Ruth, don't be a faddist. Then I want you to lay your decision about Jennings on the shelf. Let it rest for a while. Postpone the wedding if you wish----"

"But, Tom," tucked in Edith, "that's impossible. The invitations----"

"Never mind, never mind, Edith," interrupted Tom. Then to Ruth he went on. "Postpone the wedding--oh, say a month or two, and then see how you feel. That's all I ask. Reasonable, isn't it?" he appealed to us all.

"I'll have a talk with Jennings in the meanwhile," he went on. "This suffrage tommy-rot is working all sorts of unnecessary havoc. I'm sick of it. I didn't suppose it had caught any one in our family though. You drop it, Ruth, for a while. You wait. I'm going back home next Wednesday. Now I want you to pack up your things and be ready to start with me Wednesday night from New York. We'll see what Elise and the youngsters will do for you."

"I'm sorry, Tom," replied Ruth pleasantly, "but my decision about Bob is final; and as for going out West with you and becoming a fifth wheel in your household--no, I've had enough of that. My mind is made up. I'm going to New York."

"But I shan't allow it," announced Tom.

"Then," replied Ruth, "I shall have to go without your allowing it."

"What do you mean?" demanded Tom.

"Why--just what I say. I'm of age. If I were a man, I wouldn't have to ask my older brother's permission."

"And how do you intend to live?"

"On my income," said Ruth. "I bless father now for that stock he left me. Eight hundred dollars a year has been small for me so far. I have had to have help, I know, but it will support my new life. I never was really grateful to father for that money till now. It makes me independent of you, Tom."

Edith, glaring inimically from her corner, exclaimed, "Grateful to her father! That's good!"

"My dear girl," said Tom, "we've never told you before, because we hoped to spare your feelings, but the time has come now. That stock father left you hasn't paid a dividend for a dozen years. It isn't worth its weight in paper. I have paid four hundred dollars, and Edith has been kind and generous enough to contribute four hundred dollars more, to keep you in carfares, young lady. It isn't much in order to talk of your independence around here."

The color mounted to Ruth's cheeks. She straightened. "What do you mean?" she asked.

"Exactly what I say. You haven't a penny of income. Edith and I are responsible for your living, and I want you to understand clearly that I shall not support a line of conduct which does not meet with my approval. Nor Edith either, I rather imagine."

"No, indeed, I won't," snapped out Edith. "I shan't pay a cent more.

It's only rank ingrat.i.tude I get for it anyhow."

"Do you mean to say," said Ruth in a low voice--there was no flippancy to her now--"I've been living on Edith's charity, and yours, all these years? That I haven't anything of my own--not even my clothes--not even _this_," she touched a blue enameled watch and chain about her neck, "which I saved and saved so for? Haven't I any income? Haven't I a cent that's mine, Tom?"

"Not a red cent, Ruth--just some papers that we might as well put into the fireplace and burn up."

"Oh," she burst forth, "how unfair--how cruel and unfair!"

"There's grat.i.tude for you," threw in Edith.

"To bring me up," went on Ruth, "under a delusion. To let me go on, year after year, thinking I was provided for, and then suddenly, when it pleases you, to tell me that I'm an absolute dependent, a creature of charity. Oh, how cruel that is! You tell me I ought to be grateful.

Well, I'm not--I'm not grateful. You've been false with me. You've brought me up useless and helpless. I'm too old now to develop whatever talent I may have had. I can only drudge now. What is there I can do _now_? Nothing--nothing--except scrub floors or something like that."

"Oh, yes, there is, too," said Edith. "You can marry Robert Jennings and be sensible."

"Marry a man for support, whether I want to or not? I'll die first. You _all_ want me to marry him," she burst out at us fiercely, "but I shan't--I shan't. I'm strong and healthy, and I'm just beginning to discover that I've got some brains, too. There's something I can do, surely, some way I can earn money. I shan't go West with you, Tom.

Understand that. I can't quite see myself growing old in all your various households--old and useless and dependent like lots of unmarried women in large families. I can't see it without a fight anyhow. I don't care if I haven't any income. I can be a clerk in a store, I guess. Anyhow I shan't go West with you, Tom. I am of age. You can't make me. I know I'm just a woman, but I intend to live my own life just the same, and there's no one in this world who can bind and enslave me either!"

"You go upstairs, Ruth," ordered Tom. "I won't stand for such talk as that. You go upstairs and quiet down, and when you're reasonable, we'll talk again. We're not children."

"No, we're not," replied Ruth, "neither of us, and I shan't be sent upstairs as if I was a child either! You can pauperize me, and you can take away every rag I have on my back, too, if you want to, but I'll tell you one thing, you can't take away my independence. You think, Tom, you can frighten me, and conquer me, perhaps, by bullying. But you can't. Conditions are better for women than they used to be, anyhow, thank heaven, and for the courageous woman there's a chance to escape from just such masters of their fates as _you_--Tom Vars, even though you are my brother. And I shall escape somehow, _sometime_. See if I don't. Oh, I know what you all think of me," she broke off. "You all think I'm hard and heartless. Well--perhaps you're right. I guess I am.

Such an experience as this would just about kill any softhearted person, I should think. But _I'm_ not killed. Remember that, Tom. You've got money, support, sentiment on your side. I've got nothing but my own determination. But I'm not afraid to fight. And I will, if you force me.

You'd better be pretty careful how you handle such an utterly depraved person as you seem to think I am. Why, I didn't know you had such a poor opinion of me."