Ruth wanted to go to college, but her father had kept her from it. Women should marry and settle down and have families was the belief of Cyrus Holland. Going to college put foolish notions in their heads. Not being able to go had been Ruth's first big disappointment. Edith had gone East to a girls' school. At the last minute, realizing how lonely she would be at home without her chum, Ruth had begged to go with her. Her mother had urged it for her. But it was an expensive school to which Edith was going, and when he found what it would cost Ruth's father refused, saying he could not afford it, and that it was nonsense, anyway. Ruth had then put in a final plea for the State University, which would not cost half as much as Edith's school. Seeing that it meant more to her than he had known, and having a particular affection for this younger daughter of his, Mr. Holland was on the point of giving in when the newspapers came out with a scandal that centered about the suicide of a girl student at the university. That settled it; Ruth would stay home with her mother. She could go on with music, and study literature with Miss Collins. Miss Collins stood for polite learning in the town. There was not the remotest danger of an education received through her unfeminizing a girl. But Ruth soon abandoned Miss Collins, scornfully informing her parent that she would as soon study literature with a mummy. With Ruth, the desire to go to college had been less a definite craving for knowledge than a diffused longing for an enlarged experience. She wanted something different, was impatient for something new, something more. She had more curiosity about the life outside their allotted place than her friend Edith Lawrence had. She wanted to go to college because that would open out from what she had. Ruth would have found small satisfaction in that girls' school of Edith's had her father consented to her going. It was little more than the polite learning of Miss Collins fashionably re-dressed. Edith, however, came home with a new grace and poise, an added gift of living charmingly on the surface of life, and held that school was lovely. During that year her friend was away--Ruth was nineteen then--she was not so much unhappy as she was growingly impatient for something more, and expectant of it. She was always thinking that something was going to happen--that was why things did not go dead for her. The year was intensifying to her; she missed her friend; she had been baffled in something she wanted. It made her conscious of wanting more than she had. Her energies having been shut off from the way they had wanted to go, she was all the more zestful for new things from life. There was much in her that her life did not engage.