Ruth was a pretty and amiable girl, about Julia's age, and therefore a little older than "The Four." She had been in the school for two years before the coming of Julia, but in all that time she had had only a speaking acquaintance with the other girls. Many of them would probably have been surprised had any one told them that they were very selfish in leaving their schoolmate so entirely to herself. It was not because they did not like her. They were merely so very much wrapped up in their own affairs, that they hardly noticed that she was often left to herself. Ruth lived in the suburbs, and as Belle had said, outside of school the other girls seldom saw her. At recess each little group had so many personal things to talk about that an outsider would have been decidedly in the way, and would, perhaps, have been a little uncomfortable in joining them. No one gets a great deal of enjoyment from reading a single chapter in the middle of a book, and so it is often hard to be a mere listener when the tongues of half a dozen girls are vigorously discussing people and events of which the listener has not the slightest knowledge.