eighteen. She came out to
the club one Saturday afternoon to watch some tennis. It happened
that I had worked into the finals of the tournament but that day I
wasn't playing very well. I was beaten in the first set, six-two. What
was worse I didn't care a hang if I was. I had found myself feeling
like this about a lot of things during those last few months. Then as
I made ready to serve the second set I happened to see in the front
row of the crowd to the right of the court a slight girl with blue
eyes. She was leaning forward looking at me with her mouth tense and
her fists tight closed. Somehow I had an idea that she wanted me to
win. I don't know why, because I was sure I'd never seen her before;
but I thought that perhaps she had bet a pair of gloves or a box of
candy on me. If she had, I made up my mind that she'd get them. I
started in and they said, afterwards, I never played better tennis in
my life. At any rate I beat my man.

After the game I found someone to introduce me to her and from that
moment on there was nothing else of so great consequence in my life. I
learned all about her in the course of the next few weeks. Her family,
too, was distinctly middle-class, in the sense that none of them had
ever done anything to distinguish themselves either for good or bad.
Her parents lived on a small New Hampshire farm and she had just been
graduated from the village academy and had come to town to visit her
aunt. The latter was a tall, lean woman, who, after the death of her
husband had been forced to keep lodgers to eke out a living. Ruth
showed me pictures of her mother and father, and they might have been
relatives of mine as far as looks went. The father had caught an
expression from the granite hills which most New England farmers
get--a rugged, strained look; the mother was lean and kind and
worried. I met them later and liked them.

Ruth was such a woman as my mother would have taken to; clear and
laughing on the surface, but with great depths hidden among the golden
shallows. Her experience had all been among the meadows and mountains
so that she was simple and direct and fearless in her thoughts and
acts. You never had to wonder what she meant when she spoke and when
you came to know her you didn't even have to wonder what she was
dreaming about. And yet she was never the same because she was always
growing. But the thing that woke me up most of all from the first day
I met her was the interest she too