Page:Bobbie, General Manager (1913).djvu/178

168 Edith's social activities are simply marvellous to me. She has her plan of campaign—the various combinations of people to be invited to dinner-parties, bridges, or small teas, all mapped out and written down in a book at the beginning of each season. Then she manages to inveigle, by means of big fat cheques, I imagine, lions—pianists, and authors, and lecturers, whom everybody wants to see and hear—to act as her guest of honour. So her parties are always rather popular, you see. Oh, Edith is clever. She may not understand my nature very well, but to the likes and dislikes, pet ambitions and pleasures of human-nature generally she can cater to the queen's taste.

She has fairly hypnotised Ruth. My little sister thinks there is no one like her. As soon as Edith married Alec, she took complete possession of Ruth, provided her with a lot of lovely clothes and sent her off, for the first winter, to a fashionable boarding-school in New York. After eight dazzling months of that sort of life she ordained that Ruth should return to Hilton and "come out." Last fall she gave her a reception that fairly thrilled the town. Edith's word is sacred law to Ruth; Edith's opinion the ultimatum to any doubt on any question whatsoever. I am a mere speck on Ruth's outlook on life; my ideas don't count; I am so old-fashioned and so easily shocked; I don't know what style is; I don't possess a scrap of what Edith calls social-sense. Perhaps as much as anything else it is Edith's complete possession of Ruth that hurts me. It seems a shame that she couldn't have been satisfied with Alec. I don't see why she had to rob me of my only sister