after the first of November, so she could go direct from her life class to the lecture. She would have liked to attend some of the evening classes, too, but Gloria had suggested that she wait a bit.

“My word, child, it’s all right to work hard. One must work hard, but don’t spend twenty-four hours a day at it. It’s bad enough to begin at the unearthly hour of nine in the morning without spending your evenings there, too.”

Afterward Ruth was glad that she had not enrolled in any of the evening classes. She usually returned to the house on Gramercy Square about five o’clock in the afternoon, just when Gloria’s day seemed to be properly begun, and there were always people there who interested Ruth, though she took 25little part in the conversation. Ruth would come into the hall, her sketches under her arm, and Gloria would call to her and she would walk into the big comfortable room and be introduced to half a dozen people, whose names she seldom remembered. The people would nod to her and go on with their conversation, and she would sit back listening and watching, feeling more like an audience at a play than one of the group of people in a drawing-room.

25

Most of the conversation was quite meaningless to her, but there was one man, one of the few who did not change in the ever-changing group, who interested her intensely. She gathered that he was a playwright and that he had written the book and lyrics for a musical comedy that was to have its New York première soon. One of the other men called him a show doctor, and said that he had written lines into over half the shows on Broadway.

première

All of the other people seemed to think him “terribly clever,” but Ruth didn’t understand all of the things at which they laughed. They were always begging him to sing his latest song, and he never demurred, though any one could tell with half an ear that he hadn’t any voice at all. He sang in a queer, half-chanty voice, with a curious appealing note in it.

“Do you really like his singing?” she once asked Gloria.

“His voice, you mean?” Gloria looked at her with the little frown between her eyes and the 26amused twist to her mouth that Ruth often observed when her aunt was explaining things to her. “Of course not; it’s not his voice, it’s his song. He’s the cleverest song writer in New York, and he’s already written two fairly successful plays. He’s young, you know.”

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