Embrace our aims: work out your freedom. Girls,
Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed;
Drink deep until the habits of the slave,
The sins of emptiness, gossip and spite
The Princess.
Whether medicine is a science, or only an empirical method of getting a living out of the ignorance of the human race, Ruth found before her first term was over at the medical school that there were other things she needed to know quite as much as that which is taught in medical books, and that she could never satisfy her aspirations2 without more general culture.
“Does your doctor know any thing—I don’t mean about medicine, but about things in general, is he a man of information and good sense?” once asked an old practitioner3. “If he doesn’t know anything but medicine the chance is he doesn’t know that.”
The close application to her special study was beginning to tell upon Ruth’s delicate health also, and the summer brought with it only weariness and indisposition for any mental effort.
In this condition of mind and body the quiet of her home and the unexciting companionship of those about her were more than ever tiresome4.
She followed with more interest Philip’s sparkling account of his life in the west, and longed for his experiences, and to know some of those people of a world so different from here, who alternately amused and displeased5 him. He at least was learning the world, the good and the bad of it, as must happen to every one who accomplishes anything in it.
But what, Ruth wrote, could a woman do, tied up by custom, and cast into particular circumstances out of which it was almost impossible to extricate6 herself? Philip thought that he would go some day and extricate Ruth, but he did not write that, for he had the instinct to know that this was not the extrication7 she dreamed of, and that she must find out by her own experience what her heart really wanted.
Philip was not a philosopher, to be sure, but he had the old fashioned notion, that whatever a woman’s theories of life might be, she would come round to matrimony, only give her time. He could indeed recall to mind one woman—and he never knew a nobler—whose whole soul was devoted8 and who believed that her life was consecrated9 to a certain benevolent10 project in singleness of life, who yielded to the touch of matrimony, as an icicle yields to a sunbeam.
Neither at home nor elsewhere did Ruth utter any complaint, or admit any weariness or doubt of her ability to pursue the path she had marked out for herself. But her mother saw clearly enough her struggle with infirmity, and was not deceived by either her gaiety or by the cheerful composure which she carried into all the ordinary duties that fell to her. She saw plainly enough that Ruth needed an entire change of scene and of occupation, and perhaps she believed that such a change, with the knowledge of the world it would bring, would divert Ruth from a course for which she felt she was physically11 entirely12 unfitted.
It therefore suited the wishes of all concerned, when autumn came, that Ruth should go away to school. She selected a large New England Seminary, of which she had often heard Philip speak, which was attended by both sexes and offered almost collegiate advantages of education. Thither13 she went in September, and began for the second time in the year a life new to her.
The Seminary was the chief feature of Fallkill, a village of two to three thousand inhabitants. It was a prosperous school, with three hundred students, a large corps14 of teachers, men and women, and with a venerable rusty15 row of academic buildings on the shaded square of the town. The students lodged16 and boarded in private families in the place, and so it came about that while the school did a great deal to support the town, the town gave the students society and the sweet influences of home life. It is at least respectful to say that the influences of home life are sweet.
Ruth’s home, by the intervention17 of Philip, was in a family—one of the rare exceptions in life or in fiction—that had never known better days. The Montagues, it is perhaps well to say, had intended to come over in the Mayflower, but were detained at Delft Haven18 by the illness of a child. They came over to Massachusetts Bay in another vessel19, and thus escaped the onus20 of that brevet nobility under which the successors of the Mayflower Pilgrims have descended21. Having no factitious weight of dignity to carry, the Montagues steadily22 improved their condition from the day they landed, and they were never more vigorous or prosperous than at the date of this narrative23. With character compacted by the rigid24 Puritan discipline of more than two centuries, they had retained its strength and purity and thrown off its narrowness, and were now blossoming under the generous modern influences. Squire25 Oliver Montague, a lawyer who had retired26 from the practice of his profession except in rare cases, dwelt in a square old fashioned New England mansion27 a quarter of a mile away from the green.
It was called a mansion because it stood alone with ample fields about it, and had an avenue of trees leading to it from the road, and on the west commanded a view of a pretty little lake with gentle slopes and nodding were now blossoming under the generous modern influences. But it was just a plain, roomy house, capable of extending to many guests an unpretending hospitality.
The family consisted of the Squire and his wife, a son and a daughter married and not at home, a son in college at Cambridge, another son at the Seminary, and a daughter Alice, who was a year or more older than Ruth. Having only riches enough to be able to gratify reasonable desires, and yet make their gratifications always a novelty and a pleasure, the family occupied that just mean in life which is so rarely attained28, and still more rarely enjoyed without discontent.
If Ruth did not find so much luxury in the house as in her own home, there were evidences of culture, of intellectual activity and of a zest29 in the affairs of all the world, which greatly impressed her. Every room had its book-cases or book-shelves, and was more or less a library; upon every table was liable to be a litter of new books, fresh periodicals and daily newspapers.
There were plants in the sunny windows and some choice engravings on the walls, with bits of color in oil or water-colors; the piano was sure to be open and strewn with music; and there were photographs and little souvenirs here and there of foreign travel. An absence of any “what-pots” in the corners with rows of cheerful shells, and Hindoo gods, and Chinese idols30, and nests of useless boxes of lacquered wood, might be taken as denoting a languidness in the family concerning foreign missions, but perhaps unjustly.
At any rate the life of the world flowed freely into this hospitable31 house, and there was always so much talk there of the news of the day, of the new books and of authors, of Boston radicalism32 and New York civilization, and the virtue33 of Congress, that small gossip stood a very poor chance.
All this was in many ways so new to Ruth that she seemed to have passed into another world, in which she experienced a freedom and a mental exhilaration unknown to her before. Under this influence she entered upon her studies with keen enjoyment34, finding for a time all the relaxation35 she needed, in the charming social life at the Montague house.
It is strange, she wrote to Philip, in one of her occasional letters, that you never told me more about this delightful36 family, and scarcely mentioned Alice who is the life of it, just the noblest girl, unselfish, knows how to do so many things, with lots of talent, with a dry humor, and an odd way of looking at things, and yet quiet and even serious often—one of your “capable” New England girls. We shall be great friends. It had never occurred to Philip that there was any thing extraordinary about the family that needed mention. He knew dozens of girls like Alice, he thought to himself, but only one like Ruth.
Good friends the two girls were from the beginning. Ruth was a study to Alice; the product of a culture entirely foreign to her experience, so much a child in some things, so much a woman in others; and Ruth in turn, it must be confessed, probing Alice sometimes with her serious grey eyes, wondered what her object in life was, and whether she had any purpose beyond living as she now saw her. For she could scarcely conceive of a life that should not be devoted to the accomplishment37 of some definite work, and she had no doubt that in her own case everything else would yield to the professional career she had marked out.
“So you know Philip Sterling,” said Ruth one day as the girls sat at their sewing. Ruth never embroidered38, and never sewed when she could avoid it. Bless her.
“Oh yes, we are old friends. Philip used to come to Fallkill often while he was in college. He was once rusticated39 here for a term.”
“Rusticated?”
“Suspended for some College scrape. He was a great favorite here. Father and he were famous friends. Father said that Philip had no end of nonsense in him and was always blundering into something, but he was a royal good fellow and would come out all right.”
“Why, I never thought whether he was or not,” replied Alice looking up. “I suppose he was always in love with some girl or another, as college boys are. He used to make me his confidant now and then, and be terribly in the dumps.”
“Why did he come to you?” pursued Ruth, “you were younger than he.”
“I’m sure I don’t know. He was at our house a good deal. Once at a picnic by the lake, at the risk of his own life, he saved sister Millie from drowning, and we all liked to have him here. Perhaps he thought as he had saved one sister, the other ought to help him when he was in trouble. I don’t know.”
The fact was that Alice was a person who invited confidences, because she never betrayed them, and gave abundant sympathy in return. There are persons, whom we all know, to whom human confidences, troubles and heart-aches flow as naturally as streams to a placid41 lake.
This is not a history of Fallkill, nor of the Montague family, worthy42 as both are of that honor, and this narrative cannot be diverted into long loitering with them. If the reader visits the village to-day, he will doubtless be pointed43 out the Montague dwelling44, where Ruth lived, the cross-lots path she traversed to the Seminary, and the venerable chapel45 with its cracked bell.
In the little society of the place, the Quaker girl was a favorite, and no considerable social gathering46 or pleasure party was thought complete without her. There was something in this seemingly transparent47 and yet deep character, in her childlike gaiety and enjoyment of the society about her, and in her not seldom absorption in herself, that would have made her long remembered there if no events had subsequently occurred to recall her to mind.
To the surprise of Alice, Ruth took to the small gaieties of the village with a zest of enjoyment that seemed foreign to one who had devoted her life to a serious profession from the highest motives48. Alice liked society well enough, she thought, but there was nothing exciting in that of Fallkill, nor anything novel in the attentions of the well-bred young gentlemen one met in it. It must have worn a different aspect to Ruth, for she entered into its pleasures at first with curiosity, and then with interest and finally with a kind of staid abandon that no one would have deemed possible for her. Parties, picnics, rowing-matches, moonlight strolls, nutting expeditions in the October woods,—Alice declared that it was a whirl of dissipation. The fondness of Ruth, which was scarcely disguised, for the company of agreeable young fellows, who talked nothings, gave Alice opportunity for no end of banter49.
“Do you look upon them as I subjects, dear?” she would ask.
And Ruth laughed her merriest laugh, and then looked sober again. Perhaps she was thinking, after all, whether she knew herself.
If you should rear a duck in the heart of the Sahara, no doubt it would swim if you brought it to the Nile.
Surely no one would have predicted when Ruth left Philadelphia that she would become absorbed to this extent, and so happy, in a life so unlike that she thought she desired. But no one can tell how a woman will act under any circumstances. The reason novelists nearly always fail in depicting50 women when they make them act, is that they let them do what they have observed some woman has done at sometime or another. And that is where they make a mistake; for a woman will never do again what has been done before. It is this uncertainty51 that causes women, considered as materials for fiction, to be so interesting to themselves and to others.
As the fall went on and the winter, Ruth did not distinguish herself greatly at the Fallkill Seminary as a student, a fact that apparently52 gave her no anxiety, and did not diminish her enjoyment of a new sort of power which had awakened53 within her.
点击
收听单词发音
收听单词发音 |
1
slander
|
|
| n./v.诽谤，污蔑 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
2
aspirations
|
|
| 强烈的愿望( aspiration的名词复数 )； 志向； 发送气音； 发 h 音 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
3
practitioner
|
|
| n.实践者，从事者；(医生或律师等)开业者 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
4
tiresome
|
|
| adj.令人疲劳的，令人厌倦的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
5
displeased
|
|
| a.不快的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
6
extricate
|
|
| v.拯救，救出；解脱 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
7
extrication
|
|
| n.解脱；救出，解脱 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
8
devoted
|
|
| adj.忠诚的，忠实的，热心的，献身于...的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
9
consecrated
|
|
| adj.神圣的，被视为神圣的v.把…奉为神圣，给…祝圣( consecrate的过去式和过去分词 )；奉献 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
10
benevolent
|
|
| adj.仁慈的，乐善好施的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
11
physically
|
|
| adj.物质上，体格上，身体上，按自然规律 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
12
entirely
|
|
| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
13
thither
|
|
| adv.向那里；adj.在那边的，对岸的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
14
corps
|
|
| n.(通信等兵种的)部队；(同类作的)一组 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
15
rusty
|
|
| adj.生锈的；锈色的；荒废了的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
16
lodged
|
|
| v.存放( lodge的过去式和过去分词 )；暂住；埋入；（权利、权威等）归属 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
17
intervention
|
|
| n.介入，干涉，干预 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
18
haven
|
|
| n.安全的地方，避难所，庇护所 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
19
vessel
|
|
| n.船舶；容器，器皿；管，导管，血管 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
20
onus
|
|
| n.负担；责任 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
21
descended
|
|
| a.为...后裔的，出身于...的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
22
steadily
|
|
| adv.稳定地；不变地；持续地 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
23
narrative
|
|
| n.叙述，故事；adj.叙事的，故事体的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
24
rigid
|
|
| adj.严格的，死板的；刚硬的，僵硬的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
25
squire
|
|
| n.护卫, 侍从, 乡绅 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
26
retired
|
|
| adj.隐退的，退休的，退役的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
27
mansion
|
|
| n.大厦，大楼；宅第 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
28
attained
|
|
| （通常经过努力）实现( attain的过去式和过去分词 )； 达到； 获得； 达到（某年龄、水平、状况） | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
29
zest
|
|
| n.乐趣；滋味，风味；兴趣 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
30
idols
|
|
| 偶像( idol的名词复数 )； 受崇拜的人或物； 受到热爱和崇拜的人或物； 神像 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
31
hospitable
|
|
| adj.好客的；宽容的；有利的，适宜的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
32
radicalism
|
|
| n. 急进主义, 根本的改革主义 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
33
virtue
|
|
| n.德行，美德；贞操；优点；功效，效力 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
34
enjoyment
|
|
| n.乐趣；享有；享用 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
35
relaxation
|
|
| n.松弛，放松；休息；消遣；娱乐 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
36
delightful
|
|
| adj.令人高兴的，使人快乐的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
37
accomplishment
|
|
| n.完成，成就，（pl.）造诣，技能 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
38
embroidered
|
|
| adj．绣花的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
39
rusticated
|
|
| v.罚（大学生）暂时停学离校( rusticate的过去式和过去分词 )；在农村定居 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
40
fickle
|
|
| adj.(爱情或友谊上)易变的，不坚定的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
41
placid
|
|
| adj.安静的，平和的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
42
worthy
|
|
| adj.(of)值得的，配得上的；有价值的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
43
pointed
|
|
| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
44
dwelling
|
|
| n.住宅，住所，寓所 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
45
chapel
|
|
| n.小教堂，殡仪馆 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
46
gathering
|
|
| n.集会，聚会，聚集 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
47
transparent
|
|
| adj.明显的，无疑的；透明的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
48
motives
|
|
| n.动机，目的( motive的名词复数 ) | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
49
banter
|
|
| n.嘲弄，戏谑；v.取笑，逗弄，开玩笑 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
50
depicting
|
|
| 描绘，描画( depict的现在分词 )； 描述 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
51
uncertainty
|
|
| n.易变，靠不住，不确知，不确定的事物 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
52
apparently
|
|
| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
53
awakened
|
|
| v.（使）醒( awaken的过去式和过去分词 )；（使）觉醒；弄醒；（使）意识到 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
| 欢迎访问英文小说网 |