What's Right [antikvár]

CHAPTER ONE 'Pride goeth before the fall, Ruth.' She'd heard the expression a hundred times—^no, a thousand times—^and still she would not have changed a thing. Even now, the only thing that bothered her was that she hadn't fallen very far. She had hoped to be a great deal higher before she took her first tumble. The pride had been with her always; a grim, unshakeable certainty that she had been blessed with beauty and talent, and that pretending she had neither would be pointless and self-defeating. Facts were facts, and denying them for the sake of false modesty was a peculiar human characteristic she had never been able to understand. Even as a child, in the barren farmhouse where poverty had stopped time a century before, Ruth had cherished stormy dreams of greatness she had never doubted lay in her future. 'I'll be famous one day. Mother,' she had piped with the confidence of youth, 'and then I'll buy you wonderful things.' Her mother had always smiled sadly, replying in that low, soft-spoken voice of hers that money bought nothing of value, and that piety, humility and reverence were the dreams Ruth should seek. But piety, humility and reverence, qualities her mother possessed in abundance, had brought nothing but an early death to the overworked widow, and Ruth saw no value in that end at all. She was headstrong, determined, and absolutely impervious to the psychological ravages of deprivation. She knew her destiny lay far beyond the confines of the poverty and obscurity in which she had been raised, and she would settle for no less. As she nursed her mother through the long, painful