little frightened. There was nothing of the mischievous about her. She did not want to play tricks. She had just wanted to test her power, but this was the last time that she consciously tried to use it. For some time the illusion of flowers persisted whenever she thought of them, but she tried not to think of them and before many months the experiment was a thing of the past. It persisted in Ruth only in a deep-rooted faith in the power of mind, and in the truth of many things that the average person considered superstition. When she heard of deaths and births and marriages—of good luck and bad luck—of coincidences and accidents, it seemed to her that behind the obvious and accepted 6causes of all these things she could trace an inner and spiritual reason—the working of forces that laughed at the clumsy working of material machinery. Yet she no longer delved. For a while she actually made a conscious effort to look at life in the ordinary way. She was helped in this by the death of her father, which placed her in a position of responsibility toward her invalid mother, and made her life too full of reality to leave much room for the occult and supernatural.

6

She hadn’t realized quite how much she had loved her mother until she died. Mother had been old-fashioned and fussy, but then all invalids were fussy, and she had been a dear about letting her go on with her studies after Father died, even though she wouldn’t move to Chicago as Ruth wished. They could have lived as cheaply in Chicago and Ruth could have gone to the art institute there, but Mother wouldn’t consent to the move. She wanted to stay near her friends. Ruth couldn’t understand that. Her mother’s friends were all such ordinary people. Kind-hearted, but quite hopelessly ordinary. It was curious that her mother’s death had realized for her one of her most cherished dreams. Mother knew that she was going to die. The doctors had told her so, and she had told Ruth. It made Ruth cry, but her mother didn’t shed any tears. That was why Ruth did. If her mother had cried Ruth would have been more controlled, but her mother was so unnaturally calm.

7“When I am gone I want you to go to your father’s sister, Gloria Mayfield. I hate to send you there, but there’s no one else of your blood, and you’re too young to live alone. Gloria has retired from the stage and they say she is quite respectable now, and besides you won’t be dependent on her. Now that there will be no more doctors’ bills to pay, there will be enough money for you to live on, more than any young girl ought to have in her own hands. It is all in trust and you will have just the income until you 

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