Ruth Carey had been accustomed to fend for herself nearly all her life. Her lot had been cast in a
very narrow groove, and it had not contained a single gleam of romance to make it beautiful. The
whole of her early girlhood had been spent buried in a country vicarage, utterly out of touch with all
the rest of the world. Here she had lived with her grandfather, leading a wild and free existence,
wholly independent of society, hewing, as it were, a way for herself in a desert that was very empty
and almost unthinkably barren.