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The dragon continued talking to Ruth, while Carl listened, in the interstices of his chatter to Olive: "I hope you haven't been giving all your time and beauty-sleep doing too much of that settlement work, Ruthie and Heaven only knows what germs you will get there of course I should be the first to praise any work for the poor, ungrateful and shiftless though they are what with my committees and the Truegate Temperance Home for Young Working Girls it's all very well to be sympathetic with them, but when it comes to a settlement-house, and Heaven knows I have given them all the counsel and suggestions I could, though some of the professional settlement workers are as pert as they can be, and I really do believe some of them think they are trying to end poverty entirely, just as though the Lord would have sent poverty into the world if He didn't have a very good reason for it you will remember the Bible says, 'The poor you always have with you, and as Florence Barclay says in her novels, which may seem a little sentimental, but they are of such a good moral effect, you can't supersede the Scriptures even in the most charming social circles.
But Carl and she had withdrawn a bit from the crowds, and in the dunes had made a nest, with a book and a magazine and a box of chocolates and Carl's collapsible lunch-kit. Not New York only, but all of Ruth's relatives were forgot. Aunt Emma Truegate Winslow was a myth of the dragon-haunted past. Here all was fresh color and free spaces looking to open sea.
They lived in the Nineties, between Broadway and Riverside Drive; a few blocks from the Winslow house in distance, but one generation away in the matter of decoration. The apartment-house itself was comparatively old-fashioned, with an intermittent elevator run by an intermittent negro youth who gave most of his time to the telephone switchboard and mysterious duties in the basement; also with a down-stairs hall that was narrow and carpeted and lined with offensively dark wood. But they could see the Hudson from their living-room on the sixth floor at the back of the house (the agent assured them that probably not till the end of time would there be anything but low, private houses between them and the river); they were not haunted by Aunt Emma Truegate Winslow; and Ruth, who had long been oppressed by late-Victorian bric-
She had a habit of nodding intelligently even when she was not listening, and another habit of rubbing her left knuckles with the fingers of her right hand. Not imposing in appearance was Aunt Emma Truegate Winslow, but she was born to discipline a court. An impeccable widow was she, speaking with a broad A, and dressed exquisitely in a black satin evening gown.
He had an anticipatory fondness for all of the small friendly family group which was about to receive him. And he was cast into a den of strangers, most of them comprised in the one electric person of Aunt Emma Truegate Winslow. At a White House reception she would pleasantly but firmly have sent the President about his business, and have taken his place in the receiving line.
By such simple-hearted traits as being always right about unimportant matters and idealistically wrong about important matters, politely intruding into everything, being earnest about the morality of the poor and auction bridge and the chaperonage of nice girls, possessing a working knowledge of Wagner and Rodin, wearing fifteen-dollar corsets, and believing on her bended knees that the Truegates and Winslows were the noblest families in the Social Register, Aunt Emma Truegate Winslow had persuaded the whole world, including even her near-English butler, that she was a superior woman.
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