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280 "It wouldn't be a sacrifice," remarked Ruth, turning a page of the magazine.

"Oh, come, come, Ruth!" broke in Tom irritably. "Let us not discuss such an impossibility. We're wasting time. You have your duties. This is not one of them. It's a fine impulse, generous. Oliver appreciates it. But it's quite out of the question."

"I don't see why," Ruth pursued. "For an unattached woman to come and take care of her brother's children during her vacation seems to me the most natural thing in the world."

"You know nothing about children," snorted Tom.

"I can learn," Ruth persisted.

Ruth's offer proved to be no passing whim, no sentimental impulse of the moment. Scarcely a week later, and she was actually installed in Oliver's small apartment. The family talked of little else at their various dinner-tables for weeks to come. Of all Ruth's vagaries this seemed the vaguest and most mystifying.

Oliver's apartment is really quite awful, disorderly, crowded, incongruous. It contains a specimen of every kind of furniture since the period of hair-cloth down to mission—cast-offs from the homes of Oliver's more fortunate brothers and sisters. When I first saw Ruth there in the midst of the confusion of unpacking, the room in Irving Place with its old chests and samovars, Esther Claff quietly writing in her corner, the telephone bell muffled to an undisturbing whirr, flashed before me.

The baby was crying. I smelled the odor of