Transcriber’s Note:
The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
THE STARS INCLINE
CHAPTER I
One can be nineteen and still know a greatdeal of the world. Ruth Mayfield felt thatshe knew a great deal of the world. Shecould judge character, and taking care of Mother’sbusiness affairs had helped a lot, and like most youngwomen of nineteen she knew that if marriage offeredno more to her than it had offered to her parents,she did not want to marry. Of course they hadn’tquarrelled or anything, but they lived such dull lives,and there were always money worries—and everything.
Ruth had never told her mother any of thesethings, especially after her father died and hermother had cried so much and had seemed to feeleven worse than Ruth did, for Ruth had felt badly.She had been awfully fond of her father, reallyfonder of him than of her mother. He understoodher better and it was he who had encouraged herto study art.
That was one of the things that set her apartfrom other girls in Indianapolis. She was an art2student. One day she would do great things, sheknew.
When she was a very little girl she had intendedto write. She decided this because nothing gave herso much pleasure as reading, not the sort of booksthat delight the hours of the average childhood, butbooks which, had her mother ever taken the troubleto look at them, would have made her rather concernedfor the future of the small reader. ButMrs. Mayfield never troubled to look. The booksall came from the Indianapolis public library, sothey must be all right. They were fairy tales at firstand later mythology. The mythology of the Greeksand Romans which somehow never stepped out ofthe marble for her; and the intensely human mythologyof the Icelanders and of the Celts which sheliked better, and later the mythology of India whichfascinated her most of all because it had apparentlyneither beginning nor end. While her mother andher mother’s friends were dabbling in ChristianScience and “New Thought” she was lost in themysteries of the transmigration of souls. Perhapsit was all this delving into the past that gave to herwide brown eyes what is called the spirituelle look—alook decidedly contradicted by her sturdy body;perhaps, too, it was extensive reading that finallydecided her not to try to