But even though she was not seeing the people who came she felt the added strangeness her presence made in that house which had suspended the usual affairs of living in waiting for death. The nurse was one of the girls of the town, of a family Ruth knew. She had been only a little girl at the time Ruth went away. She was conscious, in the young woman's scrupulously professional manner toward herself, of a covert interest, as in something mysterious, forbidden. She could see that to this decorous young person she was a woman out of another world. It hurt her, and it made her a little angry. She wished that this professional, proper young woman, stealing glances as at a forbidden thing, could know the world in which she actually lived. And yet it occurred to her that the strain was less great than it would have been at any other time--something about a room of death making the living a little less prone to divide themselves into good and bad, approved and condemned. With the approach of death there are likely to be only two classes--the living and the dead. After the first few hours, despite the estranging circumstances, there did seem to be some sort of a bond between her and this girl who attended her father. Ruth and Ted and Flora Copeland had had dinner together. Her Cousin Flora had evidently pondered the difficult question of a manner with Ruth and was pursuing it scrupulously. Her plan was clearly indicated in her manner. She would seem to be acting as if nothing had happened and yet at the same time made it plain that she in no sense countenanced the person to whom she was being kind. Her manner was that most dismal of all things--a punctilious kindliness. This same Cousin Flora, now an anæmic woman of forty-five, had not always been exclusively concerned with propriety. Ruth could remember Cousin Flora's love affair, which had so greatly disturbed the members of the family, and which, to save their own pride, they had thwarted. Cousin Flora had had the misfortune to fall in love with a man quite outside the social sphere of the Copelands and the Hollands. He was a young laboring man whom she knew through the social affairs of the church. He had the presumption to fall in love with her. She had not had love before, being less generously endowed in other respects than with social position in Freeport. There had been a brief, mad time when Cousin Flora had seemed to find love greater than exclusiveness. But the undesirable affair was frustrated by a family whose democracy did not extend beyond a working together for the good of the Lord, and Cousin Flora was, as Ruth remembered their saying with satisfaction, saved. Looking at her now Ruth wondered if there ever came times when she regretted having been saved.