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Fidelity: A Novel

by Susan Glaspell · English · Gutenberg #32432 · 559,384 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Fidelity: A Novel

Author: Susan Glaspell


        
Release date: May 19, 2010 [eBook #32432]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FIDELITY: A NOVEL ***




Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)







                                FIDELITY

                                A NOVEL

                           BY SUSAN GLASPELL

      Author of "THE GLORY OF THE CONQUERED," "THE VISIONING," ETC.


BOSTON
SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

_Copyright, 1915_
BY SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY
INCORPORATED)

Printers
S. J. PARKHILL & CO., BOSTON U.S.A.


TO
LUCY HUFFAKER




FIDELITY




CHAPTER ONE


It was hard to get back into the easy current of everyday talk. Cora
Albright's question had too rudely pulled them out of it, disturbing the
quiet flow of inconsequential things. Even when they had recovered and
were safely flowing along on the fact that the new hotel was to cost two
hundred thousand dollars, after they had moved with apparent serenity to
lamentation over a neighbor who was sick in bed and without a cook, it
was as if they were making a display of the ease with which they could
move on those commonplace things, as if thus to deny the consciousness
of whirlpools near by.

So they seemed to Dr. Deane Franklin, who, secured by the shadow of the
porch vine, could smile to himself at the way he saw through them.
Though Deane Franklin's smile for seeing through people was not so much
a smile as a queer little twist of the left side of his face, a screwing
up of it that half shut one eye and pulled his mouth out of shape, the
same twist that used to make people call him a homely youngster. He was
thinking that Cora's question, or at any rate her manner in asking it,
would itself have told that she had lived away from Freeport for a
number of years. She did not know that they did not talk about Ruth
Holland any more, that certainly they did not speak of her in the tone
of everyday things.

And yet, looking at it in any but the Freeport way, it was the most
natural thing in the world that Cora should have asked what she did.
Mrs. Lawrence had asked if Mr. Holland--he was Ruth's father--was
getting any better, and then Cora had turned to him with the inquiry:
"Do you ever hear from Ruth?"

It was queer how it arrested them all. He saw Mrs. Lawrence's start and
her quick look over to her daughter--now Edith Lawrence Blair, the Edith
Lawrence who had been Ruth's dearest friend. It was Edith herself who
had most interested him. She had been leaning to the far side of her big
chair in order to escape the shaft of light from the porch lamp. But at
Cora's question she made a quick turn that brought her directly into the
light. It gave her startled face, so suddenly and sharply revealed, an
unmasked aspect as she turned from Cora to him. And when he quietly
answered: "Yes, I had a letter from Ruth this morning," her look of
amazement, of sudden feeling, seemed for the instant caught there in the
light. He got her quick look over to Amy--his bride, and then her
conscious leaning back from the disclosing shaft into the shadow.

He himself had become suddenly conscious of Amy. They had been in
California for their honeymoon, and had just returned to Freeport. Amy
was not a Freeport girl, and was new to his old crowd, which the visit
of Cora Albright was bringing together in various little reunions. She
had been sitting over at the far side of the group, talking with Will
Blair, Edith's husband. Now they too had stopped talking.

"She wanted to know about her father," he added.

No one said anything. That irritated him. It seemed that Edith or her
mother, now that Cora had opened it up, might make some little attempt
at the common decencies of such a situation, might ask if Ruth would
come home if her father died, speak of her as if she were a human being.

Cora did not appear to get from their silence that she was violating
Freeport custom. "Her mother died just about a year after Ruth--left,
didn't she?" she pursued.

"About that," he tersely answered.

"Died of a broken heart," murmured Mrs. Lawrence.

"She died of pneumonia," was his retort, a little sharp for a young man
to an older woman.

Her slight wordless murmur seemed to comment on his failure to see. She
turned to Cora with a tolerant, gently-spoken, "I think Deane would have
to admit that there was little force left for fighting pneumonia.
Certainly it was a broken life!"--that last was less gently said.

Exasperation showed in his shifting of position.

"It needn't have been," he muttered stubbornly.

"Deane--Deane!" she murmured, as if in reproach for something of long
standing. There was a silence in which the whole thing was alive there
for those of them who knew. Cora and Edith, sitting close together, did
not turn to one another. He wondered if they were thinking of the
countless times Ruth had been on that porch with them in the years they
were all growing up together. Edith's face was turned away from the
light now. Suddenly Cora demanded: "Well, there's no prospect at all of
a divorce?"

Mrs. Lawrence rose and went over to Amy and opened a lively conversation
as to whether she found her new maid satisfactory. It left him and Edith
and Cora to themselves.

"No," he answered her question, "I guess not. Not that I know of."

"How terrible it all is!" Cora exclaimed, not without feeling; and then,
following a pause, she and Edith were speaking of how unbecoming the new
hats were, talking of the tea one of their old friends was giving for
Cora next day.

He sat there thinking how it was usually those little things that closed
in over Ruth. When the thought of her, feeling about her, broke through,
it was soon covered over with--oh, discussion of how some one was
wearing her hair, the health of some one's baby or merits of some one's
cook.

He listened to their talk about the changes there had been in Freeport
in the last ten or twelve years. They spoke of deaths, of marriages, of
births; of people who had prospered and people who had gone to pieces;
of the growth of the town, of new people, of people who had moved away.
In a word, they spoke of change. Edith would refer things to him and he
occasionally joined in the talk, but he was thinking less of the
incidents they spoke of than of how it was change they were talking
about. This enumeration of changes gave him a sense of life as a
continuous moving on, as a thing going swiftly by. Life had changed for
all those people they were telling Cora about. It had changed for
themselves too. He had continued to think of Edith and the others as
girls. But they had moved on from that; they were moving on all the
time. Why, they were over thirty! As a matter of fact they were women
near the middle thirties. People talked so lightly of change, and yet
change meant that life was swiftly sweeping one on.

He turned from that too somber thinking to Amy, watched her as she
talked with Mrs. Lawrence. They too were talking of Freeport people and
affairs, the older woman bringing Amy into the current of life there.
His heart warmed a little to Edith's mother for being so gracious to
Amy, though, that did not keep him from marveling at how she could be
both so warm and so hard--so loving within the circle of her approval,
so unrelenting out beyond it.

Amy would make friends, he was thinking, lovingly proud. How could it be
otherwise when she was so lovely and so charming? She looked so slim, so
very young, in that white dress she was wearing. Well, and she was
young, little older now than these girls had been when they really were
"the girls." That bleak sense of life as going by fell away; here _was_
life--the beautiful life he was to have with Amy. He watched the breeze
play with her hair and his whole heart warmed to her in the thought of
the happiness she brought him, in his gratitude for what love made of
life. He forgot his resentment about Ruth, forgot the old bitterness and
old hurt that had just been newly stirred in him. Life had been a lonely
thing for a number of years after Ruth went away. He had Amy now--all
was to be different.

They all stood at the head of the steps for a moment as he and Amy were
bidding the others goodnight. They talked of the tea Edith was to give
for Amy the following week--what Amy would wear--how many people there
would be. "And let me pick you up and take you to the tea tomorrow,"
Edith was saying. "It will be small and informal--just Cora's old
friends--and then you won't have so many strangers to meet next week."

He glowed with new liking of Edith, felt anew that sweetness in her
nature that, after her turning from Ruth, had not been there for him.
Looking at her through this new friendliness he was thinking how
beautifully she had developed. Edith was a mother now, she had two
lovely children. She was larger than in her girlhood; she had indeed
flowered, ripened. Edith was a sweet woman, he was thinking.

"I do think they're the kindest, most beautiful people!" Amy exclaimed
warmly as they started slowly homeward through the fragrant softness of
the May night.




CHAPTER TWO


He had known that Amy would ask, and wondered a little at her waiting so
long. It was an hour later, as she sat before her dressing-table
brushing her hair that she turned to him with a little laugh and asked:
"Who is this mysterious Ruth?"

He sighed; he was tired and telling about Ruth seemed a large
undertaking.

Amy colored and turned from him and picked up her brush. "Don't tell me
if you don't want to," she said formally.

His hand went round her bared shoulder. "Dearest! Why, I want to, of
course. It's just that it's a long story, and tonight I'm a little
tired." As she did not respond to that he added: "This was a hard day at
the office."

Amy went on brushing her hair; she did not suggest that he let it go
until another time so he began, "Ruth was a girl who used to live here."

"I gathered that," she replied quietly.

Her tone made no opening for him. "I thought a great deal of her," he
said after a moment.

"Yes, I gathered that too." She said it dryly, and smiled just a little.
He was more conscious than ever of being tired, of its being hard to
tell about Ruth.

"I gathered," said Amy, still faintly smiling, though, her voice went a
trifle higher, "that you thought more of her--" she hesitated, then
amended--"think more of her--than the rest of them do."

He answered simply: "Yes, I believe that's so. Though Edith used to care
a great deal for Ruth," he added meditatively.

"Well, what did she do?" Amy demanded impatiently. "What _is_ it?"

For a moment his cheek went down to her soft hair that was all around
her, in a surge of love for its softness, a swift, deep gratitude for
her loveliness. He wanted to rest there, letting that, for the time,
shut out all else, secure in new happiness and forgetting old hurts.

But he felt her waiting for what she wanted to know and so with an
effort he began: "Why, you see, dear, Ruth--it was pretty tough for
Ruth. Things didn't go right for her--not as they did for Cora and Edith
and the girls of her crowd. She--" Something in the calm of Amy's
waiting made it curiously hard to say, "Ruth couldn't marry the man she
cared for."

"Why not!" she asked dispassionately.

"Why, because it wasn't possible," he answered a little sharply. "She
couldn't marry him because he wasn't divorced," he said bluntly then.

Amy's deep gray eyes, they had seemed so unperturbed, so
unsympathetically calm, were upon him now in a queer, steady way. He
felt himself flushing. "Wasn't divorced?" she said with a little laugh.
"Is that a way of saying he was married?"

He nodded.

"She cared for a man who was married to someone else?" she asked with
rising voice.

Again he only nodded, feeling incapable, when Amy looked at him like
that, of saying the things he would like to be saying for Ruth.

Abruptly she drew her hair away. "And you can sympathize with--_like_--a
person who would do that?"

"I certainly both sympathize with and like Ruth."

That had come quick and sharp, and then suddenly he felt it all wrong
that a thing which had gone so deep into his own life should be coming
to Amy like this, that she should be taking the attitude of the town
against his friend, against his own feeling. He blamed his way of
putting it, telling himself it was absurd to expect her to understand a
bald statement like that. At that moment he realized it was very
important she should understand; not only Ruth, but something in
himself--something counting for much in himself would be shut out if she
did not understand.

It made his voice gentle as he began: "Amy, don't you know that just to
be told of a thing may make it seem very different from what the thing
really was? Seeing a thing from the outside is so different from living
through it. Won't you reserve judgment about Ruth--she is my friend and
I hate to see her unfairly judged--until some time when I can tell it
better?"

"Why have _you_ so much to do with it? Why is it so important I do
not--judge her?" Amy's sweetness, that soft quality that had been dear
to him seemed to have tightened into a hard shrewdness as she asked:
"How did _you_ happen to know it all from within?"

He pushed his chair back from her and settled into it wearily. "Why,
because she was my friend, dear. I was in her confidence."

"I don't think I'd be very proud of being in the confidence of a woman
who ran away with another woman's husband!"

Her hostile voice fanned the old anger that had so many times flamed
when people were speaking hostilely of Ruth. But he managed to say
quietly: "But you see you don't know much about it yet, Amy."

He was facing her mirror and what he saw in it made him lean forward,
his arms about her, with an impulsive: "Sweetheart, we're not going to
quarrel, are we?"

But after his kisses she asked, as if she had only been biding her time
through the interruption; "_Did_ she run away with him?"

His arm dropped from her shoulder. "They left together," he answered
shortly.

"Are they married now?"

"No."

Amy, who had resumed the brushing of her hair, held the brush suspended.
"_Living_ together--all this time--and _not_ married?"

"They are not married," was his heated response, "because the man's wife
has not divorced him." He added, not without satisfaction: "She's that
kind of a person."

Amy turned and her eyes met his. "What kind of a person?" she said
challengingly. "I presume," she added coolly, "that she does not believe
in divorce."

"I take it that she does not," was his dry answer.

She flushed, and exclaimed a little tremulously: "Well, really, Deane,
you needn't be so disagreeable about it!"

Quickly he turned to her, glad to think that he had been disagreeable;
that was so much easier than what he had been trying to keep from
thinking.

"I didn't mean to be disagreeable, Amy dear. I suppose I've got in the
habit of being disagreeable about Ruth: people here have been so hard
about her; I've resented their attitude so."

"But why should you _care_? Why is it such a personal matter to you?"

He was about to say, "She was my friend," but remembering he had said
that before, he had anew a sense of helplessness. He did not want to
talk about it any more. He had become tired out with thinking about it,
with the long grieving for Ruth and the sorrowing with her. When he
found Amy their love had seemed to free him from old hurts and to bring
him out from loneliness. Wonderful as the ecstasy of fresh love was he
had thought even more of the exquisite peace that rests in love. Amy had
seemed to be bringing him to that; and now it seemed that Ruth was still
there holding him away from it. The thought brushed his mind, his face
softening for the instant with it, that Ruth would be so sorry to have
that true.

Amy had braided her hair; the long fair braid hung over her shoulder,
beautifully framing her face as she turned to him. "Had you supposed,
when you all knew her, when she was in your crowd, that she was--that
kind of a person?"

His blood quickened in the old anger for Ruth; but there was something
worse than that--a sick feeling, a feeling in which there was
disappointment and into which there crept something that was like shame.

The telephone rang before he need reply. When he turned from it, it was
to say hurriedly, "I'll have to go to the hospital, Amy. Sorry--that
woman I operated on yesterday--" He was in the next room, gathering
together his things before he had finished it.

Amy followed him in. "Why, I'm so sorry, dear. It's too bad--when you're
so tired."

He turned and caught her in his arms and held her there close in a
passion of relief at the gentleness and love of her voice that swept
away those things about her he had tried to think were not in his mind.
Amy was so sweet!--so beautiful, so tender. Why of course she wouldn't
understand about Ruth! How absurd to expect her to understand, he
thought, when he had blurted things out like that, giving her no
satisfaction about it. He was touchy on the subject, he gladly told
himself, as he held her close in all the thankfulness of regaining her.
And when, after he had kissed her good-by she lifted her face and kissed
him again his rush of love for her had power to sweep all else away.




CHAPTER THREE


It was in that mood of passionate tenderness for Amy, a glow of
gratitude for love, that he sent his car swiftly toward the hospital.
His feeling diffused warmth for the town through which he drove, the
little city that had so many times tightened him up in bitterness.
People were kind, after all; how kind they were being to Amy, he
thought, eager to receive her and make her feel at home, anxious that
she be happy among them. The picture of Edith as she stood at the head
of the steps making plans for Amy warmed his heart to her. Perhaps he
had been unfair to Edith; in that one thing, certainly, she had failed
as a friend, but perhaps it was impossible for women to go that far in
friendship, impossible for them to be themselves on the outer side of
the door of their approval. Even Amy.... That showed, of course, how
hard it was for women whose experiences had all fallen within the circle
of things as they should be to understand a thing that was--disrupting.
It was as if their kindly impulses, sympathy, tenderness, were
circumscribed by that circle. Little as he liked that, his own mood of
the moment, his unrecognized efforts at holding it, kept him within that
sphere where good feeling lived. In it were happy anticipations of the
life he and Amy would have in Freeport. He had long been out of humor
with his town, scornful. He told himself now that that was a wrong
attitude. There was a new feeling for the homes he was passing, for the
people in those homes. He had a home there, too; it seemed to make him
one with all those people. There was warmth in that feeling of being one
with others.

He told himself that it was absurd to expect Amy to adjust herself all
in a minute to a thing he had known about for years, had all the time
known from within. He would make Amy understand; if Ruth came, Amy would
be good to her. At heart she was not like those others, and happiness
would make her want to be kind.

He saw her face lifted for that second good-by kiss--and quickened his
speed. He hoped he would not have to be long at the hospital, hoped Amy
would not be asleep when he got back home. He lingered happily around
the thought of there being a home to go back to, of how Amy would be
there when he got back.

But it was at a slower speed that, an hour later, he traveled those same
streets. He had lost his patient. It was no failure of the operator, but
one of those cases where the particular human body is not equal to the
demand made upon it, where there was no reaction. He got no satisfaction
in telling himself that the woman could not have lived long without the
operation; she had not lived with it--that was the only side it turned
to him. The surgery was all right enough, but life had ebbed away. It
brought a sense of who was master.

He had been practising for twelve years, but death always cut deep into
his spirit. It was more than chagrin, more than the disheartenment of
the workman at failure, when he lost a patient. It was a real sense of
death, and with that a feeling of man's final powerlessness.

That made it a different town through which he drove upon his return; a
town where people cut their way ruthlessly through life--and to what
end? They might be a little kinder to each other along the way, it would
seem, when this was what it came to for them all. They were kind enough
about death--not so kind about the mean twists in life.

That feeling was all wrapped up with Ruth Holland; it brought Ruth to
him. He thought of the many times they had traveled that road together,
times when he would take her where she could meet Stuart Williams, then
pick her up again and bring her home, her family thinking she had been
with him. How would he ever make Amy understand about that? It seemed
now that it could not be done, that it would be something they did not
share, perhaps something lying hostilely between them. He wondered why
it had not seemed to him the shameful thing it would appear to anyone he
told of it. Was that something twisted in him, or was it just that utter
difference between knowing things from within and judging from without?
To himself, it was never in the form of argument he defended Ruth. It
was the memory of her face at those times when he had seen what she was
feeling.

He was about to pass the Hollands'--her old home. He slackened the car
to its slowest. It had seemed a gloomy place in recent years. The big
square house in the middle of the big yard of oak trees used to be one
of the most friendly-looking places of the town. But after Ruth went
away and the family drew within themselves, as they did, the hospitable
spaciousness seemed to become bleakness, as if the place itself changed
with the change of spirit. People began to speak of it as gloomy; now
they said it looked forsaken. Certainly it was in need of painting--new
sidewalks, general repairs. Mr. Holland had seemed to cease caring how
the place looked. There weren't flowers any more.

In the upper hall he saw the dim light that burns through the night in a
house of sickness. He had been there early in the evening; if he thought
the nurse was up he would like to stop again. But he considered that it
must be almost one--too late for disturbing them. He hoped Mr. Holland
was having a good night; he would not have many more nights to get
through.

He wished there was some one of them to whom he could talk about sending
for Ruth. They had not sent for her when her mother died, but that was
sudden, everyone was panic-stricken. And that was only two years after
Ruth's going away; time had not worked much then on their feeling
against her. He would have to answer her letter and tell her that her
father could not live. He wanted to have the authority to tell her to
come home. Anything else seemed fairly indecent in its lack of feeling.
Eleven years--and Ruth had never been home; and she loved her
father--though of course no one in the town would believe _that_.

His car had slowed almost to a stop; there was a low whistle from the
porch and someone was coming down the steps. It was Ted Holland--Ruth's
younger brother.

"Hello, Deane," he said, coming out to him; "thinking of coming in?"

"No, I guess not; it's pretty late. I was just passing, and wondering
about your father."

"He went to sleep; seems quiet, and about the same."

"That's good; hope it will keep up through the night."

The young fellow did not reply. The doctor was thinking that it must be
lonely for him--all alone on the porch after midnight, his father dying
upstairs, no member of the immediate family in the house.

"Sent for Cy, Ted?" he asked. Cyrus was the older brother, older than
both Ted and Ruth. It was he who had been most bitter against Ruth.
Deane had always believed that if it had not been for Cyrus the rest of
them would not have hardened into their pain and humiliation like that.

Ted nodded. "I had written, and today, after you said what you did, I
wired. I had an answer tonight. He has to finish up a deal that will
take him a few days, but I am to keep him informed--I told him you said
it might be a couple of weeks--and he'll come the first minute he can."

There was a pause. Deane wanted to say: "And Ruth?" but that was a hard
thing to say to one of the Hollands.

But Ted himself mentioned her. "Tell you what I'm worrying about,
Deane," he blurted out, "and that's Ruth!"

Deane nodded appreciatively. He had always liked this young Ted, but
there was a new outgoing to him for this.

"Father asked for her this afternoon. I don't care whether he was just
right in his mind or not--it shows she's _on_ his mind. 'Hasn't Ruth
come in yet!' he asked, several times."

"You send for her, Ted," commanded the doctor. "You ought to. I'll back
you up if Cy's disagreeable."

"He'll be disagreeable all right," muttered the younger brother.

"Well, what about Harriett?" impatiently demanded Deane. "Doesn't she
see that Ruth ought to be here?" Harriett was Ruth's sister and the
eldest of the four children.

"Harriett would be all right," said Ted, "if it weren't for that bunch
of piety she's married to!"

Deane laughed. "Not keen for your brother-in-law, Ted?"

"Oh, I'll tell you, Deane," the boy burst out, "for a long time I
haven't felt just like the rest of the family have about Ruth. It was an
awful thing--I know that, but just the same it was pretty tough on
_Ruth_. I'll bet she's been up against it, good and plenty, and all
we've seemed to think about is the way it put us in bad. Not mother--Cy
never did really get mother, you know, but father would have softened if
it hadn't been for Cy's everlasting keeping him nagged up to the fact
that he'd been wronged! Even Harriett would have been human if it hadn't
been for Cy--and that upright husband she's got!"

The boy's face was flushed; he ran his hand back through his hair in an
agitated way; it was evident that his heart was hot with feeling about
it all. "I don't know whether you know, Deane," he said in a lowered
voice, "that mother's last words were for Ruth. They can't deny it, for
I was standing nearest her. 'Where's Ruth?' she said; and then at the
very last--'Ruth?'"

His voice went unsteady as he repeated it. Deane, nodding, was looking
straight down the street.

"Well," said Ted, after a minute, "I'm not going to have _that_ happen
again. I've been thinking about it. I did write Ruth a week ago. Now I
shall write to her before I go to bed tonight and tell her to come
home."

"You do that, Ted," said the doctor with gruff warmth. "You do that.
I'll write her too. Ruth wrote to me."

"Did she?" Ted quickly replied. "Well"--he hesitated, then threw out in
defiant manner and wistful voice, "well, I guess Ruth'll find she's got
one friend when she comes back to her old town."

"You bet she will," snapped Deane, adding in another voice: "She knows
that."

"And as for the family," Ted went on, "there are four of us, and I don't
know why Ruth and I aren't half of that four. Cy and Harriett haven't
got it all to say."

He said it so hotly that Deane conciliated: "Try not to have any split
up, Ted. That would just make it harder for Ruth, you know."

"There'll not be any split up if Cy will just act like a human being,"
said the boy darkly.

"Tell him your father was asking for Ruth and that I told you you must
send for her. See Harriett first and get her in line."

"Harriett would be all right," muttered Ted, "if let alone. Lots of
people would be all right if other people didn't keep nagging at them
about what they ought to be."

Deane gave him a quick, queer look. "You're right there, my son," he
laughed shortly.

There was a moment's intimate pause. There seemed not a sound on the
whole street save the subdued chug-chug of Deane's waiting machine. The
only light in the big house back in the shadowy yard was the dim light
that burned because a man was dying. Deane's hand went out to his
steering wheel. "Well, so long, Ted," he said in a voice curiously
gentle.

"'By, Deane," said the boy.

He drove on through the silent town in another mood. This boy's feeling
had touched something in his heart that was softening. He had always
been attracted to Ted Holland--his frank hazel eyes, something that
seemed so square and so pleasant in the clear, straight features of his
freckled face. He had been only a youngster of about thirteen when Ruth
went away. She had adored him; "my good-looking baby brother," was her
affectionate way of speaking of him. He was thinking what it would mean
to Ruth to come home and find this warmth in Ted. Why, it might make all
the difference in the world, he was gratefully considering.

When he came into the room where Amy was sleeping she awoke and sat up
in bed, rubbing sleepy eyes blinded by the light. "Poor dear," she
murmured at sight of his face, "so tired?"

He sat down on the bed; now that he was home, too tired to move. "Pretty
tired. Woman died."

"Oh, Deane!" she cried. "Deane, I'm _so_ sorry."

She reached over and put her arms around him. "You couldn't help it,
dear," she comforted. "You couldn't help it."

Her sympathy was very sweet to him; as said by her, the fact that he
couldn't help it did make some difference.

"And you had to be there such a long time. Why it must be most morning."

"Hardly that. I've been at the Hollands' too--talking to Ted. Poor
kid--it's lonesome for him."

"Who is he?" asked Amy.

"Why--" and then he remembered. "Why, Ruth Holland's brother," he said,
trying not to speak consciously. "The father's very sick, you know."

"Oh," said Amy. She moved over to the other side of her bed.

"They're going to send for Ruth."

Amy made no reply.

He was too utterly tired to think much about it--too worn for acute
sensibilities. He sat there yawning. "I really ought to write to Ruth
myself tonight," he said, sleepily thinking out loud, "but I'm too all
in." He wanted her to take the letter off his conscience for him. "I
think I'd better come to bed, don't you, honey?"

"I should think you would need rest," was her answer.

She had turned the other way and seemed to be going to sleep again.
Somehow he felt newly tired but was too exhausted to think it out. He
told himself that Amy had just roused for the minute and was too sleepy
to keep awake. People were that way when waked out of a sound sleep.




CHAPTER FOUR


The next evening Dr. Franklin got home for dinner before his wife had
returned from her tea. "Mrs. Franklin not home yet?" he asked of Doris,
their maid; he still said Mrs. Franklin a little consciously and liked
saying it. She told him, rather fluttered with the splendor of it--Doris
being as new to her profession as he to matrimony--that Mrs. Blair had
come for Mrs. Franklin in her "electric" and they had gone to a tea and
had not yet returned.

He went out into the yard and busied himself about the place while
waiting: trained a vine on a trellis, moved a garden-seat; then he
walked about the house surveying it, after the fashion of the happy
householder, as if for the first time. The house was new; he had built
it for them. From the first moment of his thinking of it it had been
designed for Amy. That made it much more than mere house. He was
thinking that it showed up pretty well with the houses of most of their
friends; Amy needn't be ashamed of it, anyhow, and it would look better
in a couple of seasons, after things had grown up around it a little
more. There would be plenty of seasons for them to grow in, he thought,
whistling.

Then he got the gentle sound of Edith's pretty little brougham and went
down to meet them. She and Amy looked charming in there--light dresses
and big hats.

He made a gallant remark and then a teasing one. "Been tea-tattling all
this time?"

"No," smiled Edith; "we took a ride."

"Such a beautiful ride," cried Amy. "Way up the river."

He had helped her out and Edith was leaning out talking to her. "I think
I'd better come for you about one," she was saying. He thought with
loving pride of how quickly Amy had swung into the life of the town.

During dinner he sat there adoring her: she was so fair, so beautifully
formed, so poised. She was lovely in that filmy dress of cloudy blue.
Amy's eyes were gray, but the darkness of her long lashes gave an
impression of darkness. Her skin was smooth and fair and the chiseling
of her features clean and strong. She held herself proudly; her fair
hair was braided around a well-poised head. She always appeared
composed; there never seemed any frittering or disorganizing of herself
in trivial feeling or movement. One out of love with her might find her
rather too self-possessed a young person.

So engaged was Deane in admiring her that it was not until they were
about to leave the table that he was conscious of something unusual
about her; even then he did not make out the excitement just beneath her
collected manner.

He wanted to show her what he had done to the vines and they went out in
the yard. Presently they sat down on the garden-seat which he had moved
a little while before. He had grown puzzled now by Amy's manner.

She was smoothing out the sash of her dress. She sang a little under her
breath. Then she said, with apparent carelessness: "Mrs. Williams was at
the tea today."

He knit his brows. "Mrs.--?" Then, understanding, his face tightened.
"Was she?" was his only reply.

Amy sang a little more. "It's her husband that your friend is living
with, isn't it?" she asked, and the suppressed excitement came nearer to
the surface though her voice remained indifferent.

He said "Yes" shortly and volunteered nothing. His face had not relaxed.

"What a sad face she has," Amy murmured.

"Think so?" He reached over and picked up a twig and flipped a piece of
it off his finger. "Oh, I don't know. I call it cold rather than sad."

"Oh, well, of course," cried Amy, "_your_ sympathies are all on the
other side!"

He did not reply. He would try to say as little as possible.

"I must say," she resumed excitedly, then drew herself back. "Mrs. Blair
was telling me the whole story this afternoon," she said quietly, but
with challenge.

The blood came to his face. He cleared his throat and impatiently threw
away the twig he had been playing with. "Well, Edith didn't lose much
time, did she?" he said coldly; then added with a rather hard laugh:
"That was the reason for the long ride, I suppose."

"I don't know that it is so remarkable," Amy began with quivering
dignity, "that she should tell me something of the affairs of the town."
After an instant she added, "I am a stranger here."

He caught the different note and turned quickly to her. "Dearest,
there's nothing about the 'affairs of the town' I won't tell you." He
put his arm around the back of the seat, the hand resting on her
shoulder. "And I must say I don't think you're much of a stranger here.
Look at the friends you've made already. I never saw anything like it."

"Mrs. Blair does seem to like me," she answered with composure. Then
added: "Mrs. Williams was very nice to me too."

His hand on her shoulder drew away a little and he snapped his fingers.
Then the hand went back to her shoulder. "Well, that's very nice," he
said quietly.

"She's coming to see me. I'm sure I found her anything but cold and
hard!"

"I don't think that a woman--" he began hotly, but checked himself.

But all the feeling that had been alive there just beneath Amy's cool
exterior flamed through. "Well, how you can stand up for a woman who did
what _that_ woman did--!"

Her cheeks were flaming now, her nostrils quivered. "I guess you're the
only person in town that does stand up for her! But of course you're
right--and the rest of them--" She broke off with a tumultuous little
laugh and abruptly got up and went into the house.

He sat there for a time alone, sick at heart. He told himself he had
bungled the whole thing. Why hadn't he told Amy all about Ruth, putting
it in a way that would get her sympathies. Surely he could have done
that had he told her the story as he knew it, made her feel what Ruth
had suffered, how tormented and bewildered and desperate she had been.
Now she had the town's side and naturally resented his championing of
what was presented as so outrageous a thing. He went over the story as
Edith would give it. That was enough to vindicate Amy.

He rose and followed her into the house. She was fingering some music on
the piano. He saw how flushed her face was, how high she carried her
head and how quick her breathing.

He went and put his arms around her. "Sweetheart," he said very simply
and gently, "I love you. You know that, don't you?"

An instant she held back in conflict. Then she hid her face against him
and sobbed. He held her close and murmured soothing little things.

She was saying something. "I was so happy," he made out the smothered
words. "It was all so--beautiful."

"But you're happy _now_," he insisted. "It's beautiful _now_."

"I feel as if my marriage was being--spoiled," she choked.

He shook her, playfully, but his voice as he spoke was not playful.
"Look here, Amy, don't say such a thing. Don't let such a thing get into
your head for an instant! Our happiness isn't a thing to talk like that
about."

"I feel as if--_that woman_--was standing between us!"

He raised her face and made her look into his own, at once stern and
very tender. "Amy love, we've got to stop this right _now_. A long time
ago--more than ten years ago--there was a girl here who had an awfully
hard time. I was sorry for her. I'm sorry for her now. Life's hit her
good and hard. We're among the fortunate people things go right for. We
can be together--happy, having friends, everybody approving, everybody
good to us. We're mighty lucky that it is that way. And isn't our own
happiness going to make us a little sorry for people who are outside all
this?" He kissed her. "Come now, sweetheart, you're not going to harden
up like that. Why, that wouldn't be _you_ at all!"

She was quiet; after a little she smiled up at him, the sweet,
reminiscently plaintive little smile of one just comforted. For the
moment, at least, love had won her. "Sometime I'll tell you anything
about it you want to know," he said, holding her tenderly and smoothing
her hair. "Meanwhile--let's forget it. Come on now, honey, change your
dress--get into something warmer and go for a ride with me. I've got to
make a couple of calls, and I want you along."

"You know," he was saying as he unfastened her dress for her, "after I
knew I was going to have you, and before I got you here, I used to think
so much about this very thing--the fun of having you going around with
me--doing things together. Now it seems--" He did not finish, for he was
passionately kissing the white shoulder which the unfastened dress had
bared. "Amy, dear,"--his voice choked--"oh, _doesn't_ it seem too good
to be true?"

His feeling for her had chased the other things away. She softened to
happiness, then grew gay. They were merry and happy again. All seemed
well with them. But when, on his rounds, they passed the Hollands' and
Ted waved from the porch he had an anxious moment of fearing she would
ask who that was and their crust of happiness would let them through. He
quickly began a spirited account of an amusing thing that had happened
in the office that day. His dream had been of a happiness into which he
could sink, not ground on the surface that must be fought for and held
by effort; but he did not let himself consider that then.




CHAPTER FIVE


The train for Chicago was several hours out from Denver when the man who
had decided that it was an uninteresting car began watching the woman
who was facing him from several seats away. He was one of those persons
with a drab exterior but not a similarly colored imagination, and he was
always striving to defeat the meager life his exterior consigned him to
by projecting himself into the possible experiences of people he watched
on the trains.

Afterwards he wondered that he should at first have passed this woman by
with the mere impression of a nice-looking woman who seemed tired. It
was when he chanced to look at her as she was looking from the window
that she arrested him. Her sweet face had steeled itself to something,
she was as if looking out at a thing that hurt her, but looking with the
courage to bear that hurt. He turned and looked from the window in the
direction of her intense gaze and then smiled at himself as he turned
back from the far-reaching monotonous plain of Eastern Colorado; he
might have known that what she was looking at was not spread out there
for anyone else to see.

She interested him all through the two days. She puzzled him. He
relieved the tedium of the journey with speculations on what sort of
thing it was she was thinking about, going over. He would arrive at a
conclusion in which he felt considerable satisfaction only to steal
another look at her and find that she did not look at all like the woman
he had made up his mind she was. What held him was the way feeling
shaped her. She had a delicate, sweet face, but there were times when it
was almost repellent in its somberness, when it hardened in a way that
puzzled him. She would sit looking from the window and it was as if a
dense sadness had settled down upon her; then her face would light with
a certain sad tenderness, and once he had the fancy of her lifting her
head out of gloom to listen to a beautiful, far-away call. There were
long meditations, far steady looks out at something, little reminiscent
smiles that lingered about her sensitive mouth after her eyes had gone
sad again. She would grow tired of thinking and close her eyes and seem
to try to rest. Her face, at those times, showed the wear of hard years,
laying bare lines that one took no count of when her eyes were lighted
and her mouth sensitive. Frequently she would turn from herself and
smile at the baby across the aisle; but once, when the baby was crowing
and laughing she abruptly turned away. He tried to construct "a life"
for her, but she did not stay in any life he carefully arranged. There
were times when he impatiently wondered why he should be wondering so
much about her; those were the times when she seemed to have let it all
go, was inert. But though he did not succeed in getting a "life" for
her, she gave him a freshened sense of life as immensely interesting, as
charged with pain and sweetness.

It was over the pain and the sweetness of life that this woman--Ruth
Holland--brooded during the two days that carried her back to the home
of her girlhood. She seemed to be going back over a long bridge. That
part of her life had been cut away from her. With most lives the past
grew into the future; it was as a growth that spread, the present but
the extent of the growth at the moment. With her there had been the
sharp cut; not a cut, but a tear, a tear that left bleeding ends. Back
there lay the past, a separated thing. During the eleven years since her
life had been torn from that past she had seen it not only as a separate
thing but a thing that had no reach into the future. The very number of
miles between, the fact that she made no journeys back home, contributed
to that sense of the cleavage, the remoteness, the finality. Those she
had left back there remained real and warm in her memory, but her part
with them was a thing finished. It was as if only shoots of pain could
for the minute unite them.

Turning her face back toward home turned her back to herself there. She
dwelt upon home as she had left it, then formed the picture of what she
would find now. Her mother and her grandfather would not be there. The
father she had left would not be there. A dying man would be there. Ted
would be grown up. She wondered if anyone had taken care of the flowers.
Would there be any roses? She and her mother had always taken care of
them. Edith--? Would Terror be there? He was only about three when she
left; dogs did live as long as that. She had named him Terror because of
his puppy pranks. But there would be no puppy pranks now. It would be a
sedate old dog she would find. He would not know her--she who had cared
for him and romped with him through his puppyhood. But they had not
shared experiences.

On the train carrying her back home her own story opened freshly to her.
Again and again she would be caught into it....

       *       *       *       *       *

Ruth Holland--the girl of twenty--was waiting for Deane Franklin to come
and take her to the dance at the Country Club. She was dressed and
wandering restlessly about the house, looking in mirrors as she passed
them, pleased with herself in her new white dress. There was an
excitement in the fact that she had not seen Deane for almost a year; he
had been away, studying medicine at Johns Hopkins. She wondered if he
would seem any different; wondered--really more interested in this than
in the other--if she would seem any different to him.

She did not think of Deane "that way" she had told Edith Lawrence, her
bosom friend from childhood, when Edith that afternoon had hinted at
romantic possibilities. Edith was in romantic mood because she and Will
Blair were in the happy state of getting over a quarrel. For a month
Ruth had listened to explosions against Will Blair. Now it was made up
and Edith was in sweetly chastened spirit. She explained to Ruth at
great length and with much earnestness that she had not understood Will,
that she had done him a great injustice; and she was going to the party
with him that night. Edith and Will and Deane and Ruth were going
together.

They were singularly unmatured for girls of twenty. Their experiences
had not taken them outside the social life of the town, and within it
they had found too easy, pre-prepared sailing for any real finding or
tests of themselves. They were daughters of two of the town's most
important families; they were two of the town's most attractive girls.
That fixed their place in a round of things not deepening, not
individualizing. It was pleasant, rather characterless living on a
limited little part of the surface of life. They went to "the parties,"
occupied with that social round that is as definite a thing in a town of
forty thousand as in a metropolis. Their emotional experiences had been
little more than part of their social life--within it and of the
character of it. Attractive, popular, of uncontested place in the
society in which they found themselves, they had not known the strivings
and the heart-aches that can intensify life within those social
boundaries. They were always invited. When they sat out dances it was
because they wanted to. Life had dealt too favoringly and too
uneventfully with them to find out what stuff was really in them. They
were almost always spoken of together--Edith Lawrence and Ruth
Holland--Ruth and Edith. That was of long standing; they had gone to
primary school together, to Sunday-school, through the high-school. They
told each other things; they even hinted at emotions concealed within
their breasts, of dissatisfactions and longings there were no words for.
Once Ruth confided that sometimes she wept and could not have said why,
and great seemed the marvel when Edith confessed to similar experiences.
They never suspected that girlhood was like that; they were like that,
and set apart and united in being so.

But those spiritual indulgences were rare; for the most part they were
what would be called two wholesome, happy girls, girls whose lot had
fallen in pleasant places.

Ruth wanted to go to college, but her father had kept her from it. Women
should marry and settle down and have families was the belief of Cyrus
Holland. Going to college put foolish notions in their heads. Not being
able to go had been Ruth's first big disappointment. Edith had gone East
to a girls' school. At the last minute, realizing how lonely she would
be at home without her chum, Ruth had begged to go with her. Her mother
had urged it for her. But it was an expensive school to which Edith was
going, and when he found what it would cost Ruth's father refused,
saying he could not afford it, and that it was nonsense, anyway. Ruth
had then put in a final plea for the State University, which would not
cost half as much as Edith's school. Seeing that it meant more to her
than he had known, and having a particular affection for this younger
daughter of his, Mr. Holland was on the point of giving in when the
newspapers came out with a scandal that centered about the suicide of a
girl student at the university. That settled it; Ruth would stay home
with her mother. She could go on with music, and study literature with
Miss Collins. Miss Collins stood for polite learning in the town. There
was not the remotest danger of an education received through her
unfeminizing a girl. But Ruth soon abandoned Miss Collins, scornfully
informing her parent that she would as soon study literature with a
mummy.

With Ruth, the desire to go to college had been less a definite craving
for knowledge than a diffused longing for an enlarged experience. She
wanted something different, was impatient for something new, something
more. She had more curiosity about the life outside their allotted place
than her friend Edith Lawrence had. She wanted to go to college because
that would open out from what she had. Ruth would have found small
satisfaction in that girls' school of Edith's had her father consented
to her going. It was little more than the polite learning of Miss
Collins fashionably re-dressed. Edith, however, came home with a new
grace and poise, an added gift of living charmingly on the surface of
life, and held that school was lovely.

During that year her friend was away--Ruth was nineteen then--she was
not so much unhappy as she was growingly impatient for something more,
and expectant of it. She was always thinking that something was going to
happen--that was why things did not go dead for her. The year was
intensifying to her; she missed her friend; she had been baffled in
something she wanted. It made her conscious of wanting more than she
had. Her energies having been shut off from the way they had wanted to
go, she was all the more zestful for new things from life. There was
much in her that her life did not engage.

She loved dancing. She was happily excited that night because they were
going to a dance. Waiting for Deane, she wondered if he had danced any
during the year, hoping that he had, and was a little better dancer than
of old. Dear Deane! She always had that "Dear Deane!" feeling after she
had been critical about him.

She wished she did think of Deane "that way"--the way she had told Edith
she did not think of him. But "that way" drew her from thoughts of
Deane. She had stopped before her dressing-table and was toying with her
manicure things. She looked at herself in the glass and saw the color
coming to her cheeks. She sat there dreaming--such dreams as float
through girlhood.

Her mother came in to see how she looked. Mrs. Holland was a small,
frail-looking woman. Ruth resembled her, but with much added. Things
caught into Ruth were not in her mother. They resembled each other in
certain definite things, but there was something that flushed Ruth to
life--transforming her--that did not live in her mother. They were alike
as a beautiful shell enclosing a light may be like one that is not
lighted. Mrs. Holland was much occupied with the social life of her
town. She was light-hearted, well-liked. She went to the teas and card
parties which abounded there and accepted that as life with no
dissatisfaction beyond a mild desire for more money.

She also enjoyed the social life of her daughter; where Ruth was to go
and what she would wear were matters of interest and importance. Indeed
life was compounded of matters concerning where one would go and what
one would wear.

"Well, Sally Gordon certainly did well with that dress," was her
verdict. "Some think she's falling off. Now do try and not get it
spoiled the first thing, Ruth. Dancing is so hard on your clothes."

She surveyed her daughter with satisfaction. Ruth was a daughter a
mother would survey with satisfaction. The strong life there was in her
was delicately and subtly suggested. She did not have what are thought
to be the easily distinguishable marks of intense feeling. She suggested
fine things--a rare, high quality. She was not out-and-out beautiful;
her beauty lurked within her feeling. It was her fluidity that made her
lovely. Her hazel eyes were ever changing with light and feeling, eyes
that could wonderfully darken, that glowed in a rush of feeling and
shone in expectancy or delight,--eyes that the spirit made. She had a
lovely brow, a sensitive, beautiful mouth. But it needed the light
within to find her beauty. Without it she was only a sweet-looking,
delicately fashioned girl.

"That's Deane," said Ruth, as the bell rang.

"I want to see him too," said Mrs. Holland, "and so will your father."

Ruth met him in the hall, holding out both hands with, "Deane, I'm _so_
glad to see you!"

He was not an expressive youth. As he shook Ruth's hands with vigor, he
exclaimed, "Same here! Same here!" and straightway he seemed just the
Deane of old and in the girl's heart was a faint disappointment.

As a little boy people had called Deane Franklin a homely youngster. His
thick, sandyish hair used to stand up in an amazing manner. He moved in
a peculiarly awkward way, as if the jointing of him had not been
perfectly accomplished. He had a wide generous mouth that was attractive
when it was not screwed out of shape. His keen blue eyes had a nice
twinkle. His abrupt, hearty manner seemed very much his own. He was
better dressed than when Ruth had last seen him. She was thinking that
Deane could actually be called attractive in his own homely, awkward
way. And yet, as he kept shaking her hands up and down, broadly
grinning, nodding his head,--"tickled to death to be back," she felt
anew that she could not think of Deane "that way." Perhaps she had known
him too long. She remembered just how absurd he had looked in his first
long trousers--and those silly little caps he had worn perched way back
on his head! Yet she really loved Deane, in a way; she felt a great deal
nearer to him than to her own brother Cyrus.

They had gone into the living-room. Mrs. Holland thought he had
grown--grown broader, anyway; Mr. Holland wanted to know about the
medical school, and would he practice in Freeport? Ted wanted to know if
Johns Hopkins had a good team.

"That's Will, I guess," he said, turning to Ruth as the bell rang.

"Oh, Will," cried Mrs. Holland, "do ask Edith to come in and show us her
dress! She won't muss it if she's careful. Her mother told me it was the
sweetest dress Edith ever had."

Edith entered in her bright, charming way, exhibiting her pretty pink
dress with a pleasure that was winning. She had more of definite beauty
than Ruth--golden hair, really sunny hair, it was, and big, deep blue
eyes and fresh, even skin. Ruth often complained that Edith had
something to count on; she could tell how she was going to look, while
with her--Ruth--there was never any knowing. Some of the times when she
was most anxious to look her best, she was, as she bewailed it, a
fright. Edith was larger than Ruth, she had more of a woman's
development.

Mrs. Holland followed them out to the carriage. "Now don't stay until
_all_ hours," was her parting admonition, in a tone of comfortable
resignation to the fact that that was exactly what they would do.

"Well," said Mr. Holland, who had gone as far as the door, "I don't know
what young folks are coming to. After nine o'clock now!"

"That must be a punk school Deane goes to," said Ted, his mind not yet
pried from the football talk.




CHAPTER SIX


"Our dance."

With a swift little movement the girl turned a glowing face to the man
standing before her. Flushed with dancing, keyed high in the pleasure
and triumphs of the evening, she turned the same radiant face to Stuart
Williams as he claimed their dance that she would have turned to almost
anyone claiming a dance. It was something that came to life in the man's
eyes as he looked down into her flushed face, meeting her happy, shining
eyes, that arrested the flashing, impersonal smile of an instant before
and underneath that impersonal gladness of youth there was a faint
flutter of self.

He was of the "older crowd;" it happened that she had never danced with
him before. He was a better dancer than the boys of her own set, but
somehow that old impersonal joy in dancing was a lesser thing now than
the sense of dancing with this man.

"That was worth coming for," he said quietly, when the dance and the
encore to it were over and they found themselves by one of the doors
opening out on the balcony.

She looked up with a smile. It was a smile curiously touched with
shyness. He saw the color wavering in her sensitive, delicate face. Then
he asked lightly: "Shall we see what's being dispensed from this
punch-bowl?"

With their ice, they stood looking out into the moonlight over a wide
stretch of meadow to far hills. "A fine night to ride over the hills and
far away," he laughed at last, his voice lingering a little on the
fancy.

She only laughed a little in reply, looking off there toward over the
hills and far away. Watching her, he wondered why he had never thought
anything much about her before. He would have said that Ruth Holland was
one of the nice attractive girls of the town, and beyond that could have
said little about her. He watched the flow of her slender neck into her
firm delicate little chin, the lovely corners of her mouth where feeling
lurked. The fancy came to him that she had not settled into flesh the
way most people did, that she was not fixed by it. He puzzled for the
word he wanted for her, then got it--luminous was what she was; he felt
a considerable satisfaction in having found that word.

"Seems to me you and Edith Lawrence grew up in a terrible hurry," he
began in a slow, teasing manner. "Just a day or two ago you were
youngsters racing around with flying pigtails, and now here you are--all
these poor young chaps--and all us poor old ones--fighting for dances
with you. What made you hurry so?" he laughed.

The coquette in most normal girls of twenty rose like a little imp up
through her dreaming of over the hills and far away. "Why, I don't
know," she said, demurely; "perhaps I was hurrying to catch up with
someone."

His older to younger person manner fell away, leaving the man delighting
in the girl, a delightfully daring girl it seemed she was, for all that
look of fine things he had felt in her just a moment before. He grew
newly puzzled about her, and interested in the puzzle. "Would you like
to have that someone stand still long enough to give you a good start?"
he asked, zestful for following.

But she could not go on with it. She was not used to saying daring
things to "older men." She was a little appalled at what she had
done--saying a thing like that to a man who was married; and yet just a
little triumphant in her own audacity, and the way she had been able to
make him feel she was something a long way removed from a little girl
with flying pigtails.

"I really have been grown up for quite a while," she said, suddenly
grave.

He did not try to bring her back to the other mood,--that astonishing
little flare of audacity; he was watching her changing face, like her
voice it was sweetly grave.

The music had begun again--this time a waltz. A light hand upon her arm,
he directed her back towards the dancing floor.

"I have this taken," she objected hesitatingly.

"This is an extra," he said.

She felt sure that it was not; she knew she ought to object, that it was
not right to be treating one of the boys of her own crowd that way. But
that consciousness of what she ought to be doing fell back--pale,
impotent--before the thing she wanted to do....

They were silent for a little time after; without commenting on doing
so, they returned to their place outside. "See?" she said presently,
"the moon has found another hill. That wasn't there when we were here
before."

"And beyond that are more hills," he said, "that we don't see even yet."

"I suppose," she laughed, "that it's not knowing where we would get
makes over the hills and far away--fun."

"Well, anything rather than standing still." He said it under his
breath, more to himself than to her. But it was to her he added,
teasingly and a little lingeringly: "Unless, of course, one were waiting
for someone to catch up with one."

She smiled without turning to him; watching her, the thought found its
way up through the proprieties of his mind that it would be worth
waiting a long time if, after the wait, one could go over the hills and
far away with a girl through whom life glowed as he could see it glowed
in this girl; no, not with a girl like this--boldly, humorously and a
little tenderly he amended in his mind--but with _this_ girl.

She wheeled about. "I must go back," she said abruptly. "This dance is
with Will Blair--I must go back. I'll have a hard enough time," she
laughed, a little nervously, "making it right with Louis Stephens."

"I'll tell him I heard it was an extra," he said.

She halted, looking up at him. "Did you hear that!" she demanded.

He seemed about to say some light thing, but that died away. "I wanted
the dance," was his quiet reply.




CHAPTER SEVEN


It was a June evening a year later that Stuart Williams sat on the steps
of the porch that ran round the side of his house, humoring the fox
terrier who thought human beings existed to throw sticks for dogs. After
a while the man grew tired of that theory of human existence, and bade
the panting Fritz lie down on the step below him. From there Fritz would
look up to his master appealingly, eyes and tail saying, "Now let's
begin again." But he got no response, so, in philosophic dog fashion,
soon stretched out for a snooze.

The man was less philosophic: he had not that gift of turning from what
he wanted to what he could have.

A little later he would go to the rehearsal of the out-of-door play the
Country Club was getting ready to give. Ruth Holland would be there: she
too was in the play. Probably he would take her home, for they lived in
the same neighborhood and a little apart from the others. It was Mrs.
Lawrence who, the night of the first rehearsal, commented with relief
for one more thing smoothly arranged upon their going the same way.

For five weeks now they had been going the same way; their talk on those
homeward walks had been the lightest of talk, for the most part a
laughing over things that had happened during the rehearsal. And yet the
whole world had become newly alive, until tonight it seemed a tremulous,
waiting world. That light talk had been little more than a pulling back
from the pauses, little more than retreat, safeguard. It was the pauses
that lived on with him, creating his dreams; her face as she turned it
to him after a silence would sometimes be as if she had been caught into
that world touched to new life--world that waited. They would renew the
light talk as if coming back from something.

He let himself slip into dreaming now; he had told himself that that, at
least, could work no one harm, and in quiet hours, when he smoked,
relaxed, he was now always drawn over where he knew he must not let
himself go. It was as if something stronger than he was all around him.
One drooping hand caressed his dog; he drew in the fragrance from a rose
trellis near by; the leaves of the big tree moved with a gentle little
sound, a sound like the whisper of sweet things; a bird
note--goodnight--floated through the dusk. He was a man whom those
things reached. And in the last year, particularly in those last weeks,
it had come to be that all those things were one with Ruth Holland; to
open to them meant being drawn to her.

He would tell himself that that was wrong, mad; nothing he could tell
himself seemed to have any check on that pull there was on him in the
thought of her. He and his wife were only keeping up the appearance of
marriage. For two years he had not had love. He was not a man who could
learn to live without it. And now all the desirableness of life, hunger
for love, the whole of earth's lure seemed to break in through the
feeling for this girl--that wrong, wonderful feeling that had of itself
flushed his heart to new life.

Sharply he pulled himself about, shifting position as if to affirm his
change of thinking. It turned him from the outer world to his house; he
saw Marion sitting in there at her desk writing a letter. He watched
her, thinking about her, about their lives. She was so poised, so cool;
it would seem, so satisfied. Was she satisfied? Did denial of life leave
nothing to be desired? If there were stirrings for living things they
did not appear to disturb her calm surface. He wondered if a night like
this never touched old things in her, if there were no frettings for
what she had put out of her life.

He watched her small, beautifully shaped dark head, the fine smooth hair
that fell over the little ear he had loved to kiss. She was beautiful;
it was her beauty that had drawn him to her. She was more beautiful than
Ruth Holland, through whom it seemed all the beauty of the world reached
him. Marion's beauty was a definite separate thing; his face went tender
as he thought how Ruth Holland only grew beautiful in beauty, as if it
broke through her, making her.

Once more he moved sharply, disturbing the little dog at his feet; he
realized where his thoughts had again gone, how looking at his wife it
was to this other girl he was drawn, she seeming near him and Marion
apart. He grew miserable in a growing feeling of helplessness, in a
sense of waiting disaster. It was as if the whole power of life was
drawing him on to disaster. Again that bird call floated through the
dusk; the gentle breeze stirred the fragrance of flowers; it came to
seem that the world was beautiful that it might ensnare him, as if the
whole power of the sweetness of life was trying to pull him over where
he must not go. He grew afraid. He got the feeling that he must do
something--that he must do it at once. After he had sat there brooding
for half an hour he abruptly got up and walked in where his wife was
sitting.

"Marion," he began brusquely, "I should like to speak to you."

She had been sitting with her back to the door; at his strange address
of her she turned round in surprise; she looked startled when she saw
his strained face.

"We've been married about six years, isn't it?"

He had come a little nearer, but remained standing. He still spoke in
that rough way. She did not reply but nodded slightly, flushing.

"And now for two years we--haven't been married?"

She stiffened and there was a slight movement as if drawing back. She
did not answer.

"I'm thirty-four and you're a little less than that." He paused and it
was more quietly, though none the less tensely that he asked: "Is it
your idea that we go through life like this?"

She was gathering together the sheets of paper on her desk. She did not
speak.

"You were angry at me--disappointed. I grant you, as I did at the time,
that it was a silly affair, not--not creditable. I tried to show you how
little it meant, how it had--just happened. Two years have passed; we
are still young people. I want to know--do you intend this to go on? Are
our whole lives to be spoiled by a mere silly episode?"

She spoke then. "Mere silly episode," she said with a high little laugh,
"seems rather a slight way to dispose of the fact that you were untrue
to me." She folded her letter and was putting it in the envelope. It
would not go in and she refolded it with hands not steady.

He did not speak until she had sealed the letter and was sitting there
looking down at her hands, rubbing them a little, as if her interest was
in them. "Marion," he asked, and his voice shook now, "doesn't it ever
seem to you that life is too valuable to throw away like this?" She made
no reply and angered by her unresponsiveness he added sharply: "It's
rather dangerous, you know."

She looked up at him then. "Is this a threat?" she asked with a faint,
mocking smile.

He moved angrily, starting to leave the room. "Have you no feeling?" he
broke out at her. "Is this all you _want_ from life?"

She colored and retorted: "It was not the way I expected to live when I
married you."

He stood there doggedly for a moment, his face working with nervousness.
"I think then," he said roughly, "that we'd better be decent enough to
get a divorce!" At what he saw in her face he cried passionately: "Oh
no, you don't believe in divorce--but you believe in _this_!"

"Was it _I_ who brought it about?" she cried, stung to anger.

She had risen and for an instant they stood there facing each other.
"Haven't you any humanity?" he shot rudely at her. "Don't you ever
_feel_?"

She colored but drew back, in command of herself again. "I do not
desecrate my feelings," she said with composure; "I don't degrade my
humanity."

"Feeling--humanity!" he sneered, and wheeled about and left the room.

He started at once for his rehearsal. He was trembling with anger and
yet underneath that passion was an unacknowledged feeling of relief. It
had seemed that he had to do something; now he told himself that he had
done what he could. He walked slowly through the soft night, seeking
control. He was very bitter toward Marion, and yet in his heart he knew
that he had asked for what he no longer wanted. He quickened his step
toward the Lawrences', where they were to hold the rehearsal, where he
would find Ruth Holland.




CHAPTER EIGHT


After the maelstrom of passion had thrown her out where life left her
time to think about what she had felt, Ruth Holland would wonder whether
there was something in her that made her different from the good people
of the world. Through it all she did not have the feeling that it would
seem she would have; what she did did not make her feel as she knew,
when she came to think it out, she would be supposed to feel about such
a thing. In hours that would be most condemned she had had a simple
feeling of life as noble. What would be called the basest things she had
done had seemed to free something within her that made her more kind,
more generous, more tender, made her as a singing part of a fine,
beautiful world. Her degradation had seemed to burn away all that was
not pure, giving her a sense of being lifted up; it was as if through
this illicit love a spiritual fount was unsealed that made her
consciously one with life at its highest. Afterwards she wondered about
it, wondered whether she was indeed different from people who were good,
or whether it could be that hearts had been shown, not as they were, but
as it was deemed meet they should be shown.

When she and Deane, with Edith and Will Blair, went home from the dance
that night, something new breathed through the night. It was hard to
join in the talk; she wanted to be alone, alone with that new stir. She
was gentle with Deane as they stood for a moment at the door. She felt
tender toward him. A little throb of excitement in her voice, the way
her eyes shone, made him linger there with her a moment or two. It was
as if he wanted to say something but the timid, clumsy words he spoke
just before leaving were, "That sure is a peach of a dress. You had them
all beat tonight, Ruth," and Ruth went into the house knowing now for
sure how impossible it would be ever to think of Deane "that way." In
the hour before she went to sleep what she meant by "that way" was a
more living thing than it had ever been before.

The year which followed was not a happy one; it was a disturbed, a
fretted year; girlhood was too ruffled for contentment in the old
things, and yet she was not swept on. The social life of the town
brought her and Stuart Williams together from time to time. They always
had several dances together at the parties. It was those dances that
made the party for her. If he were not there, the evening was a dead
thing. When he was, something came to life in her that made everything
different. She would be excited; she had color; her eyes shone. It
made her gay, as an intoxicant may make one gay. Though when she
danced with him she went curiously silent; that stilled her. After
going home she would lie awake for hours, live over every slightest
thing he had said, each glance and move. It was an unreal world
of a new reality--quickened, heightened, delirious, promising.

In that first year she sometimes wondered if it was what would be called
a flirtation. It did not seem so to her, and it was true that after that
first night at the Country Club the quality of flirtation somehow fell
away. Afterwards, when it became the thing that made her life, she
looked back in wonderment to the light little way it had begun. That too
did not seem as it should be--that a thing of such tremendous and
ruthless power, a thing that swept her whole life on at its will, should
come into life in a way so slight, so light, so much of chance. At first
it was just the faintest little breath; but it stirred something, it
grew, it became a great wind that there was no force anywhere to combat.
In that first year there was between them, unspoken of, a consciousness
of feeling touched in the other, a sense of the disturbance, the pull.
It seemed very wonderful to her that just his presence in the room could
make her feel alive in a way she had never felt alive before. And it was
sweet almost beyond belief, it was intoxicating, to come to know that
her presence was that same strange wine to him. She had seen his eyes
anxiously rove a crowded room and stop with her, his face lighting. She
loved remembering his face once at a card party of the older crowd where
she had been tardily summoned by a disappointed hostess. He had been in
the room several minutes, she watching him unseen. He was not looking
anxiously about this time, as she had seen him do at the dancing
parties. She thought he looked tired as he and his wife came in, not as
if anticipating pleasure. Then he saw her and she never forgot that leap
of glad surprise in his eyes, the quick change in him, the new buoyancy.

She would have supposed, thinking back to it afterward, that she would
have drawn back; that before feeling really broke through, a girl such
as she, reared as she had been, a part of such a society, a girl, as
they afterward said, who should have known right from wrong would, in
that time of its gathering, have drawn back from so shameful a thing as
love with another woman's husband. It was as mystifying to her that she
did not fight against it as it was that it should have come. She did not
understand the one nor the other. Certainly it was not as she would have
supposed it would be had she heard of such a thing. Something seemed to
have caught her up, to have taken her. She was appalled at times, but
the truth was that she was carried along almost without resistance;
ideas of resistance were there, but they were pale things, not charged
with power. She would suppose, had she known the story only through
hearing it, that she would have thought intensely and become wretched in
the thought of Mrs. Williams. Perhaps if Mrs. Williams had been a plain
little woman, or a sad looking one, that would have come home to her
harder. But one would not readily pity Marion Williams, or get the
feeling of wronging her. As Marion Averley she had been the reigning
girl of the town. Ruth, ten years younger, had not come far enough out
from her little girl's awe of Marion Averley, the young lady, to be
quick in getting the feeling of wronging Marion Williams, the wife.
Perhaps one would be more slow in getting a feeling of wronging the most
smartly dressed woman in the room than would be the case with the wife
dowdy or drab. Mrs. Williams, while not radiating happiness, seemed
somehow impervious to unhappiness, and certainly to any hurt another
woman could bring her. She had an atmosphere of high self-valuation.
While she never appeared to be having an especially good time she gave a
sense of being perfectly able to command a better one had it pleased her
to do so.

People had supposed that Marion Averley would make a brilliant marriage.
Her grandfather had made his money in lumber, in those early days of
lumber kings on the Mississippi. Locally they were looked upon as rich
people. Marion had gone to a fashionable school, to Europe. People of
the town said there was nothing "local" about her. Other girls had been
as much away and yet would return seeming just a part of the town. That
was why everyone was surprised when the Averleys announced Marion's
engagement to Stuart Williams. He was distinctly local and his people
were less important than hers. He had come home from college and gone
into business. His father had a small canning factory, an industry that
for years had not grown much, remaining one of the small concerns in a
town of rapidly growing manufactories. Stuart went into business with
his father and very soon there were expansions, new methods; he brought
imagination to bear upon it, and a big fund of young man's energy, until
it rapidly came up from a "nice little business" to one of the things
that counted in the town. He had a talent for business; his imagination
worked that way and he was what they called a hustler. He soon became a
part of a number of things, both personal affairs and matters of public
concern. He came to be alluded to as one of the prominent young business
men. Even before Marion Averley married him people were saying that he
would make money.

They liked her for marrying him. They said it showed that there was more
to her than they had supposed, that there was warmth she did not show.
For she must have married him for the good old reason that she had
fallen in love with him. Their engagement brought Stuart Williams into a
new social conspicuousness, though he had the qualities--in particular a
certain easy, sunny manner--that had made him popular all along. During
the engagement people spoke of the way Marion seemed to thaw out; they
liked her much better than they had in the days of being awed by her
sophistication, her aloofness.

After their marriage the Williams' were leaders of the young married
set. Their house was the gayest place in town; Stuart Williams had the
same talent in hospitality that he had for business--growing, perhaps,
out of the same qualities. He was very generally and really deeply
liked; they called him a good fellow, a lovable chap. For about four
years people spoke of it as a successful marriage, though there were no
children. And then, just what it was no one knew, but the Williams'
began to seem different, going to their house became a different thing.
The people who knew Marion best had a feeling that she was not the same
after the visit of that gay little Southern matron whom she had known in
school at Washington. It was very gay at the Williams' through that
visit, and then Marion said she was tired out and they were going to
draw in for a little, and somehow they just never seemed to emerge from
that drawing in. Her friends wondered; they talked about how Stuart and
this friend of Marion's had certainly hit it off wonderfully; some of
them suspected, but Marion gave no confidences. She seemed to carry her
head higher than ever; in fact, in some curious way she seemed to become
Marion Averley again while Stuart Williams concentrated more and more
upon the various business affairs he was being drawn into. It came about
that the Williams' were less and less mentioned when the subject of
happy marriages was up, and when time had swung Ruth Holland and Edith
Lawrence into the social life of the town it was the analytical rather
than the romantically minded citizens who were talking about them.

Perhaps life would have been quite another thing for a number of people
if the Country Club had not decided to replenish its treasury by giving
a play. Mrs. Lawrence was chairman of the entertainment committee. That
naturally brought Edith and Ruth into the play, and one night after one
of those periods of distraction into which the organizer of amateur
theatricals is swept it was Mrs. Lawrence who exclaimed, "Stuart
Williams! Why couldn't he do that part?"--and Stuart Williams, upon
learning who was in the cast, said he would see what he could do with
it.

Again, at the close of the first rehearsal, as they stood about in the
hall at the Lawrences', laughing over mishaps, it was Mrs. Lawrence who
said, "You and Ruth go the same way, don't you, Stuart?"

Tonight they were going that way after the final rehearsal. It was later
than usual; they went slowly, saying little. They had fallen silent as
they neared Ruth's home; they walked slowly and in silence outside the
fence; paused an instant at the gate, then, very slowly, started up the
walk which led to the big white square house and came to a stop beneath
the oak tree which was so near the house that its branches brushed the
upper window panes.

They stood there silent; the man knew that he ought to go at once; that
in that silence the feeling which words had so thinly covered would
break through and take them. But knowing he should go seemed without
power to make him go. He watched the girl's slightly averted face. He
knew why it was averted. He felt sure that he was not alone in what he
felt.

And so he stood there in the sweetness of that knowing, the sweetness of
that understanding why she held herself almost rigid like that, feeling
surging higher in him in the thought that she too was fighting feeling.
The breeze moved the hair on her temples; he could see the throb in her
uncovered throat, her thin white dress moving over her quick breathing.
Life was in her, and the desire for life. She seemed so tender, so
sensitive.

He moved a step nearer her, unable to deny himself the sweetness of
confirming what it was so wonderful to think. "I won't be taking you
home tomorrow night," he said.

She looked at him, then swiftly turned away, but not before he had seen
her eyes.

"Shall you care?" he pressed it, unsteadily.

He knew by her high head, her tenseness, that she was fighting something
back; and he saw the quivering of her tender mouth.

She cared! She _did_ care. Here was a woman who cared; a woman who
wanted love--his love; a woman for whom life counted, as it counted for
him. After barren, baffled days, days of denial and humiliation, the
sweetness of being desired possessed him overwhelmingly as they stood
there in the still, fragrant night before the darkened house.

He knew that he must go; he _had_ to go; it was go now, or--. But still
he just stood there, unable to do what he knew he should do, reason
trying to get hold of that moment of gathering passion, training
striving to hold life.

It was she who brought them together. With a smothered passionate little
sob she had swayed toward him, and then she was in his arms and he was
kissing her wet eyes, that tender mouth, the slim throbbing throat.




CHAPTER NINE


There followed three years of happiness wrung from wretchedness, years
in which the splendor of love would blaze through the shame of
concealment, when joy was always breaking out through fear, when moments
of beautiful peace trembled there in the ugly web of circumstance. Life
was flooded with beauty by a thing called shameful.

Her affairs as a girl went on just the same; the life on the surface did
not change. She continued as Ruth Holland--the girl who went to parties
with the boys of her own set, one of her particular little circle of
girls, the chum of Edith Lawrence, the girl Deane Franklin liked best.
But a life grew underneath that--all the time growing, crowding. She
appeared to remain a girl after passion had swept her over into
womanhood. To be living through the most determining, most intensifying
experience of life while she appeared only to be resting upon the
surface was the harassing thing she went through in those years before
reality came crashing through pretence and disgrace brought relief.

She talked to but one person in those years. That was Deane. The night
he told her that he loved her she let him see.

That was more than a year after the night Stuart Williams took her home
from that last rehearsal; Deane was through school now and had come home
to practice medicine. She had felt all along that once he was at home
for good she might have to tell Deane; not alone because he would
interfere with her meetings with Stuart, but because it seemed she could
not bear the further strain of pretending with him. And somehow she
would particularly hate pretending with Deane. Though the night she did
let him see it was not that there was any determination for doing so,
but because things had become too tense that night and she had no power
to go on dissembling.

It began in irritation at him, the vicious irritation that springs out
against the person who upsets a plan he knows nothing about, and cannot
be told of.

She had come in from an errand down town and was about to dress
hurriedly to go over to Edith's for dinner. She was going to make some
excuse for getting away from there early and would have an hour with
Stuart, one of those stolen hours that often crowded, agitated, a number
of the hours before it, one of those hours of happiness when fear always
stood right there, but when joy had a marvellous power to glow in an
atmosphere of ugly things. A few nights before she had tried to arrange
one of those times, and just as she was about to leave the house, saying
some vague thing about running in somewhere--there was no strict
surveillance on members of the Holland household--a friend who had been
very ill and was just beginning to go about had come to see her and she
had been obliged to sit there through the hour she had been living for,
striving to crowd down what she was feeling and appear delighted that
her friend was able to be about, chatting lightly of inconsequential
things while she could think of nothing but Stuart waiting for her, had
had to smile while she wanted to sob in the fury of disappointed
passion.

The year had brought many disappointments like that, disappointments
which found their way farther into the spirit because they dared not
show on the surface. Of late there had been so many of them that it was
growing hard to hold from her manner her inner chafing against them.
There were times when all the people who loved her seemed trying to
throw things in her way, and it was the more maddening because blindly
done. It was hurting her relations with people; she hated them when they
blunderingly stepped in the way of the thing that had come to mean
everything to her.

She was particularly anxious about this night for Stuart was going out
of town on a business trip and she would not see him again for more than
a week. It was her grandfather who made the first difficulty; as she was
going up the stairs he called, "You going over to the Lawrences'
tonight, Ruth?"

When she had answered yes he continued: "It wouldn't be much out of your
way, would it, to run on over to the Allens'?"

She hesitated; anything her grandfather asked of her was hard to refuse,
not only because she loved him and because he was old, but because it
hurt her to see how he missed the visiting around among his old friends
that his rheumatism had of late cut him off from.

"Why--no," she answered, wondering just how she could get it in, for it
did take her out of her way, and old Mr. Allen would want to talk to
her; it was going to be hard to get away from Edith's anyway, and the
time would be so short, for Stuart would have to leave for his train at
half past nine. She quickly decided that she would go over there before
dinner, even though it made her a little late. Maybe she didn't need to
comb her hair, after all.

She was starting up the stairs when her grandfather called: "Wait a
minute. Come here, Ruth."

She came back, twirling the fingers of one hand nervously. Her
grandfather was fumbling in the drawer of his secretary. "I want you to
take this letter--tell him I got it yesterday--" He stopped, peering at
the letter; Ruth stood there with hand clenched now, foot tapping. "Why
no, that's not the one," he rambled on; "I must have put it up above
here. Or could it--"

"Oh, I'm in a hurry, grandfather!" cried the girl.

He closed the drawer and limped over to his chair. "Just let it go,
then," he said in the hurt voice of one who has been refused a thing he
cannot do for himself.

"Now, grandfather!" Ruth cried, swiftly moving toward him. "How can you
be so _silly_--just because I'm a little nervous about being late!"

"Seems to me you're always a little nervous about something lately," he
remarked, rising and resuming the leisurely search for the letter. "You
young folks make such hard work of your good times nowadays. Anybody'd
think you had the world on your shoulders."

Ruth made no reply, standing there as quietly as she could, waiting
while her grandfather scanned a letter. "Yes, this is the one," he
finally said. "You tell him--" She had the letter and was starting for
the stairs while listening to what she was to tell, considering at the
same time how she'd take the short cut across the high-school ball
park--she could make it all right by half past six. Feeling kindly
toward her grandfather because it was going to be all right, after all,
she called back brightly: "Yes, grandfather, I'll get it to him; I'll
run right over there with it first thing."

"Oh, look here, Ruth!" he cried, hobbling out to the hall. "Don't do
that! I want you to go in the evening. He'll not be home till eight
o'clock. He's going--"

"Yes, grandfather," she called from the head of the stairs in a
peculiarly quiet voice. "I see. It's all right."

Then she could not find the things she wanted to put on. There was a
button off her dress and her thread broke in sewing it. She was holding
herself very tight when her mother came leisurely into the room and
stood there commenting on the way Ruth's hair was done, on the
untidiness of her dressing-table, mildly reproving her for a growing
carelessness. Then she wandered along about something Ruth was to tell
Edith's mother. Ruth, her trembling fingers tangling her thread, was
thinking that she was always to tell somebody something somebody else
had said, take something from one person to another. The way people were
all held together in trivial things, that thin, seemingly purposeless
web lightly holding them together was eternally throwing threads around
her, keeping her from the one thing that counted.

"There!" escaped from her at last, breaking the thread and throwing the
dress over her head. Her mother sauntered over to fasten it for her,
pausing to note how the dress was wearing out, speaking of the new one
Ruth must have soon, and who should make it. "Oh, I'm in a _hurry_,
mother!" Ruth finally cried when her mother stopped to consider how the
dress would have had more style if, instead of buttoning down the back,
it had fastened under that fold.

"Really, my dear," Mrs. Holland remonstrated, jerking the dress straight
with a touch of vexation, "I must say that you are getting positively
peevish!"

As Ruth did not reply, and the mother could feel her body tightening,
she went on, with a loving little pat as she fastened the dress over the
hip, "And you used to be the most sweet-tempered girl ever lived."

Still Ruth made no answer. "Your father was saying the other night that
he was sure you couldn't be feeling well. You never used to be a bit
irritable, he said, and you nearly snapped his head off when he
wanted--just to save you--to drive you over to Harriett's."

Though the dress was all fastened now, Ruth did not turn toward her
mother. Mrs. Holland added gently: "Now that wasn't reasonable, was it?"

The tear Ruth had been trying to hold back fell to the handkerchief she
was selecting. No, it wouldn't seem reasonable, of course; her father
had wanted to help her, and she had been cross. It was all because she
couldn't tell him the truth--which was that she hadn't told him the
truth, that she wasn't going to Harriett's for an hour, that she was
going to do something else first. There had been a moment of actually
hating her father when, in wanting to help her, he stepped in the way of
a thing he knew nothing about. That, it seemed, was what happened
between people when things could not be told.

Mrs. Holland, seeing that Ruth's hand was unsteady, went on, in a voice
meant to soothe: "Just take it a little easier, dear. What under the sun
have you got to do but enjoy yourself? Don't get in such a flutter about
it." She sighed and murmured, from the far ground of experience: "Wait
till you have a real worry."

Ruth was pinning on her hat. She laughed in a jerky little way and said,
in a light voice that was slightly tremulous: "I did get a little
fussed, didn't I? But you see I wanted to get over to Edith's before
dinner time. She wants to talk to me about her shower for Cora
Albright."

"But you have all evening to talk that over, haven't you?" calmly
admonished Mrs. Holland.

"Why, of course," Ruth answered, a little crisply, starting for the
door.

"Your petticoat's showing," her mother called to her. "Here, I'll pin it
up for you."

"Oh, let it _go_!" cried Ruth desperately. "I'll fix it at Edith's," she
added hurriedly.

"Ruth, are you crazy?" her mother demanded. "Going through the streets
with your petticoat showing! I guess you're in no such hurry as that."

It was while she was pinning up the skirt that Mrs. Holland remarked:
"Oh, I very nearly forgot to tell you; Deane's going over there for you
tonight."

Then to the mother's utter bewilderment and consternation Ruth covered
her face with her hands and burst into sobs.

"Why, my _dear_," she murmured; "why, Ruth _dear_, what _is_ the
matter?"

Ruth sank down on the bed, leaning her head against the foot of it,
shaking with sobs. Her mother stood over her murmuring, "Why, my dear,
what _is_ the matter?"

Ruth, trying to stop crying, began to laugh. "I didn't know he was
coming! I was so surprised. We've quarrelled!" she gulped out
desperately.

"Why, he was just as natural and nice as could be over the 'phone," said
Mrs. Holland, pouring some water in the bowl that Ruth might bathe her
eyes. "Really, my dear, it seems to me you make too much of things. He
wanted to come here, and when I told him you were going to be at
Edith's, he said he'd go there. I'm sure he was just as nice as could
be."

Ruth was bathing her eyes, her body still quivering a little. "Yes, I
know," she spluttered, her face in the water; "he is that way
when--after we've quarrelled."

"I didn't know you and Deane ever did quarrel," ventured Mrs. Holland.
"When you do, I'll warrant it's your fault." She added, significantly:
"Deane's mighty good to you, Ruth." She had said several things like
that of late.

"Oh, he's good enough," murmured Ruth from the folds of the towel.

"Now, powder up a little, dear. There! And now just take it a little
easy. Why, it's not a hit like you to be so----touchy."

She followed Ruth downstairs. "Got that letter?" the grandfather called
out from his room.

"I'll send Ted with it, father," Mrs. Holland said hastily, seeing
Ruth's face.

A sudden surge of love for her mother almost swept away Ruth's
self-command. It was wonderful that some one wanted to help her. It made
her want to cry.

Her mother went with her to the porch. "You look so nice," she said
soothingly. "Have a good time, dearie."

Ruth waved her hand without turning her face to her mother.

Tears were right there close all through that evening. The strain within
was so great--(what _was_ she going to do about Deane?)--that there was
that impulse to cry at the slightest friendliness. She was flushed and
tired when she reached Edith's, and Mrs. Lawrence herself went out and
got her a glass of water--a fan, drew up a comfortable chair. The whole
house seemed so kindly, so favoring. Contrasted with her secret turmoil
the reposefulness, friendliness of the place was so beautiful to her
that taut emotions were ready to give. Yet all the while there was that
inner distress about how to get away, what to say. The affectionate
kindness of her friends, the appeal of their well-ordered lives as
something in which to rest, simply had no reach into the thing that
dominated her.

And now finally she had managed it; Deane had come before she could
possibly get away but she had said she would have to go up to
Harriett's, that she must not be too late about it. Edith had protested,
disappointed at her leaving so early, wanting to know if she couldn't
come back. That waved down, there had been a moment of fearing Edith was
going to propose going with her; so she had quickly spoken of there
being something Harriett wanted to talk to her about. She had a warm,
gentle feeling for Edith when finally she saw the way clearing. That was
the way it was, gratitude to one who had moved out of her way gave her
so warm a feeling that often she would impulsively propose things
letting her in for future complications.

As she was saying goodnight there was another moment of wanting terribly
to cry. They were so good to her, so loving--and what would they think
if they knew? Her voice was curiously gentle in taking leave of them;
there was pain in that feeling of something that removed her from these
friends who cared for her, who were so good to her.

She asked Deane if he hadn't something else to do for an hour, someone
to run in and see while she visited with Harriett. When he readily fell
in with that, saying he hadn't been to the Bennetts' since coming home
and that it would be a good time to go there, she grew suddenly gay,
joking with him in a half tender little way, a sort of affectionate
bantering that was the closest they came to intimacy.

And then at the very last, after one thing and then another had been
disposed of, and just as her whole being was fairly singing with relief
and anticipation, the whole thing was threatened and there was another
of those moments of actually hating one who was dear to her.

They had about reached the corner near Harriett's where she was going to
insist Deane leave her for the Bennetts' when they came upon her brother
Ted, slouching along, whistling, flipping in his hand the letter he was
taking to his grandfather's old friend.

"Hello," he said, "where y' goin'?"

"Just walking," said Ruth, and able to say it with a carelessness that
surprised her.

"Oh," said Ted, with a nonchalance that made her want to scream out some
awful thing at him, "thought maybe you were making for Harriett's. She
ain't home."

She would like to have pushed him away! She would have liked to push him
way off somewhere! She dug her nails down into her palm; she could
hardly control the violent, ugly feeling that wanted to leap out at
him--at this "kid brother" whom she adored. Why need he have said just
_that_?--that particular thing, of all things! But she was saying in
calm elderly sister fashion, "Don't lose that letter, Ted," and to
Deane, as they walked on, "Harriett's at a neighbor's; I'll run in for
her; she's expecting me to."

But it left her weak; her legs were trembling, her heart pounding; there
seemed no power left at the center of her for holding herself in one.

And now she was rid of Deane! She had shaken them all off; for that
little time she was free! She hurried toward the narrow street that
trailed off into the country. Stuart would be waiting for her there. Her
joy in that, her eagerness, rushed past the dangers all around her, the
thing that possessed her avoiding thought of the disastrous
possibilities around her as a man in a boat on a narrow rushing river
would keep clear of rocks jutting out on either side. Sometimes the
feeling that swept her on did graze the risks so close about her and she
shivered a little. Suppose Harriett were at the Bennetts' when Deane got
there! Suppose Deane said something when they got home; suppose Ted said
something that wouldn't fit in with what Deane said; suppose Deane got
to Harriett's too soon--though she had told him not to be there till
after half past nine. Hadn't Deane looked queer at the last? Wouldn't he
suspect? Wouldn't everybody suspect, with her acting like this? And once
there was the slightest suspecting....

But she was hurrying on; none of those worries, fears, had power to lay
any real hold on the thing that possessed her; faster and faster she
hurried; she had turned into the little street, had passed the last
house, turned the bend in the road, and yes! there was Stuart, waiting
for her, coming to her. Everything else fell away. Nothing else in the
world mattered.




CHAPTER TEN


Ten o'clock found Ruth sitting on the porch at home with her mother and
father, her brother Cyrus and Deane. Her father was talking with Deane
about the operation that had been performed on the book-keeper in Mr.
Holland's bank; Cyrus talked of somebody's new touring car, the number
of new machines there were in town that year; her mother wondered where
some of the people who had them got the money for them. The talk moved
placidly from one thing to another, Mr. Holland saying at intervals that
he must be going to bed, his wife slapping at the mosquitoes and talking
about going inside--both delaying, comfortably stupid.

Ruth was sitting on the top step leaning back against the porch pillar.
She said little, she was very tired now. Something in this dragging talk
soothed her. It seemed safe just because it was so commonplace; it was
relaxing. She was glad to be back to it--to the world of it; in
returning safely to it she felt a curiously tender feeling for it, a
perhaps absurd sense of having come through something for it. She could
rest in it while within herself she continued to live back in that hour
with Stuart, that hour which struggle and fear and the passionate
determination to have in spite of everything had made terribly intense.
They had closed themselves in with that little while of love, holding it
apart from everything else, and yet every minute of it was charged with
the consciousness of what was all around them. They had clung to that
hour with a desperate passion, the joy of the moment that was there
always stabbed with pain for a moment passing. At the last they had
clung to each other as if time too--time, over which they had no
control--was going to beat them apart. So much had been hard that in
returning she had a warm feeling of gratitude to all of them for not
making it harder for her, not questioning, exposing her; relief was so
great that they were all newly dear for thus letting her alone. She had
managed all right with Deane, the clumsy arrangement she had been forced
into appeared to have just that haphazardness which characterizes most
of the arrangements of life. Her mother had merely asked what the
Lawrence's had for dinner; her father joked about the way she had
trained the roses in the back yard. Strangely enough instead of feeling
she had outraged them, been unworthy this easy, affectionate
intercourse, she had a sense, now that she had again come through a
precarious thing safely, of having saved them from something they knew
not of, a strange lifted-up feeling of bearing something for them.
Certainly that would not seem the feeling she should be having, but
there was the odd part of it: the feelings she had were so seldom those
she would expect herself to have.

Her mother and father had gone indoors; Cyrus sat out there with her and
Deane for a time. Ruth did not love Cyrus as she loved Ted; he had
always had too superior a manner with her for her feeling to be more
than the perfunctory thing which sometimes passes for personal affection
in families. It was simply that she had never admitted, even to herself,
that she did not love him. He belonged to the set just older than
Ruth's, though she and Deane and their friends were arriving now at the
time of ceasing to be a separate entity as the young crowd and were
being merged in the group just above them. That contributed to Cyrus's
condescension, he being tempered for condescension.

When she and Deane were alone the talk lagged, Ruth sitting there at the
head of the steps leaning against the pillar, he a few steps below her,
sprawled out in awkward boyish fashion, looking up at her from time to
time as she said something. Her silence did not make him feel cut off
from her; the things she said were gently said; her tired smile was
sweet. He spoke several times of going, but lingered. He was held by
something in Ruth; it stirred something in him, not knowing that he was
drawn by what another man had brought into life. He drew himself up and
stole timid glances at Ruth as she looked out into the night, feeling
something new in her tonight, something that touched the feeling that
had all the time been there in him, growing as he grew, of itself
waiting for the future as simply and naturally as all maturing things
wait for the future. Ruth was the girl he had all the time cared for; he
was shy about emotional things--awkward; he had had almost no emotional
life; he had all the time been diffident about what she made him feel
and so they had just gone along for a little time longer than was usual
as boy and girl. But something sweet, mysterious, exhaling from her
tonight liberated the growing, waiting feeling in him. It took him as he
had not been taken before; he watched Ruth and was stilled, moved,
drawn.

Finally, as if suddenly conscious of a long silence, she turned to him
with something about the plans for Cora Albright's wedding--she was to
be a bridesmaid and he an usher. She went on talking of the man Cora was
to marry, a man she met away from home and had fallen desperately in
love with. He associated the light of her face, the sweetness of her
voice, with the things of romance of which she talked. All in a moment
his feeling for her, what her strange, softened mood touched in him,
leaped up, surging through him, not to be stayed. He moved nearer her.
"You know, Ruth," he said, in queer, jerky voice, "_I_ love you."

She gave a start, drew a little back and looked at him with a certain
startled fixity as if he had stopped all else in her. For the moment she
just looked at him like that, startled, fixed.

"Could you care for me at all, Ruth?" he asked wistfully, and with a
bated passionateness.

And then she moved, and it seemed that feeling, too, moved in her again;
there was a flow of emotions as she sat looking at him now. And then her
strangely shining eyes were misty; her face quivered a little and very
slowly she shook her head.

"Don't do that, Ruth," he said quickly, in a voice sharp with pain.
"Don't do that! You don't _know_--maybe you hadn't thought about
it--maybe--" He broke off, reached out for her hands, and could only
stammer, "Oh, Ruth!--I love you so!"

He had her hands; he was clutching them very tight; he looked up at her
again, imploring. She started to shake her head again, but did not
really do it. She seemed about to speak, but did not. What could she say
to Deane--how make him understand?--unless she told him. She thought of
the years she had known him, how much they had been together, how good
he had been to her. Again her eyes were misty. It was all so tangled.
There was so much pain.

Feeling her softening, her tenderness, he moved nearer, her two hands
pressed together so tight in his that it hurt her. "It wouldn't be so
bad, would it, Ruth?" he urged wistfully, with a little laugh that broke
with emotion. "You and I--mightn't life go pretty well for us?"

She turned away, looking out into the night. Feeling something in her
that he did not understand he let her hands go. She put one of them up,
still further averting her face, lost to him in the picture forming
itself before her of how life would be if love came right; what it would
mean not to have to hide, but to have those who cared for her happy in
her happiness; what it would mean to give herself to love without fear,
to wear her joy proudly before the world, revealing her womanhood. She
was not thinking of what life with Deane would be but of what love that
could have its place would be: telling her mother and father and Edith,
being able to show the pride of being loved, the triumph of loving.
Sitting there, turning her face from this friend who loved her, she
seemed to be turning it to the years awaiting her, years of desperately
clutching at happiness in tension and fear, not understood because
unable to show herself,--afraid, harassed, perhaps disgraced. She wanted
to take her place among women who loved and were loved! She did not want
to be shut away from her friends, not seeming to understand what she
understood so well. This picture of what life would be if love could
have its place brought home to her what it meant to love and perpetually
conceal, stealing one's happiness from the society in which one lived.
Why could it not have gone right for her too, as it had for Cora and
would for Edith? She too wanted a wedding, she too wanted rejoicing
friends.

She hid her face in her hands. Her body was quivering.

The boy's arm stole round her shoulders. She was feeling--maybe she did
care. "Ruth," he whispered, "love does mean something to you, doesn't
it?"

She raised her head and looked at him. And that look was a thing Deane
Franklin never forgot; all the years did not blur his memory of it--that
flaming claim for love that transformed her face.

And then it was lost in contrition, for she saw what he had seen, and
what he hoped from that; in her compunction for having let him see what
was not for him, the tender, sorrowing look, the impulsive outreaching
of her hand, there was the dawn of understanding.

At first he was too bewildered to find words. Then: "You care for some
one else?" he groped unbelievingly.

She looked away, but nodded; her tears were falling.

He moved a little away and then sat there quite still. A breeze had come
up and the vines beat against the porch, making a sound that like the
flaming look of a moment ago he never forgot.

She knew that he must be wondering; he knew her life there, or what
seemed her life. He must be wondering who it was she cared for like
that.

She laid her hand upon his arm; and when he turned to her she did not
say anything at all, but the appeal that looked through pain perhaps
went where words could not have gone.

"But you're not happy!" he exclaimed, in a sort of harsh exulting in
that.

She shook her head; her eyes were brimming over.

He looked away from her, his own hurt and surprise rousing a savage
thing in him that did not want to do what the pleading pain of her eyes
so eloquently asked of him. He had always thought that _he_ was to have
Ruth. Well, he was not to have her--there were ugly things which, in
that first moment, surged into his disappointment. Some one else was to
have her. But she was not happy! Defeated feeling wrenched its own sorry
satisfaction from that.

"Why aren't you happy?" he asked of her abruptly, roughly.

She did not answer, and so he had to look at her. And when he saw Ruth's
face his real love for her broke through the ugliness of thwarted
passion. "Can't you tell me, Ruth?" he asked gently.

She shook her head, but the concern of his voice loosed feeling she was
worn out with holding in. Her eyes were streaming now.

His arm went round her shoulder, gently, as if it would shield, help.
His love for her wrenched itself free--for that moment, at least,--from
his own hurt. "Maybe I can help you, Ruth," he was murmuring.




CHAPTER ELEVEN


He went away from there that night not knowing more than that; it was
merely that she let him see. He knew now that there was some big thing
in her life he had known nothing about; that he had not understood Ruth,
though he had known her through all the years and had thought he knew
her so well. He was bewildered, his pain was blunted in that
bewilderment. There was a sick sense of life as all different, but he
was too dazed then for the pain that came later with definite knowing.
He went home that night and because he could not sleep tried to read a
medical book; usually that took all his mind, for the time other things
would not exist for him. But that was not true tonight; that world of
facts could not get him; he lived right on in the world of his own
feeling. He was not to have Ruth; he did not seem able to get a real
sense of that either, there was just a sick feeling about it rather than
actual realization, acceptance. And what did it mean? Surely he knew
Ruth's life, the people she went with; it was always he, when he was at
home, Ruth went about with. Someone away from home? But she had been
very little away from home. Who could it be? He went over and over that.
It came to seem unreal; as if there were some misunderstanding, some
mistake. And yet, that look.... His own disappointment was at times
caught up into his marvel at her; that moment's revelation of what her
caring could be was so wonderful as to bear him out of the fact that it
was not for him she cared. That was the way it was all through, his love
for her deepening with his marvel at her, the revelation of what she
felt for another man claiming more and more of himself for her. It was a
thing he would have scoffed at if told of, it was a thing he could not
somehow justify even to himself, but it was true that the more he saw of
what love meant to Ruth the more Ruth came to mean to him.

In those next few months, the months before he actually knew, there were
times when he could almost persuade himself that there was something
unreal about it all, torturous wonderings as to who the man could be
trailing off into the possibility of there being no man, because he knew
of none; sometimes he tried to persuade himself that this passionate
feeling he had glimpsed in Ruth was a thing apart from any particular
man--for who _was_ the man? Sometimes he could, for a moment, let in the
hope that since she could care like that she would care for him. Though
he more than half knew he deluded himself in that; there was, now that
his eyes were opened, that in Ruth's manner to indicate something in her
life which did not appear on the surface. He saw how nervous she
was--how strained at times, how worried and cross, which was not like
Ruth at all. There were times when her eyes were imploring, times when
they were afraid, again there were moments of that lovely calm, when
feeling deep and beautiful radiated from her, as it had that night they
sat on the steps and, drawn by something in her, he had to tell her that
he loved her. She did queer unreasonable things, would become
exasperated at him for apparently nothing at all. Once when she had told
him she was going somewhere with her mother he later saw her hurrying by
alone; another time she told him she was going to Edith's, and when he
called up there, wanting to take them both with him for a long trip he
had to make into the country, Edith said Ruth had not been there.
Thoughts that he did not like, that he could not believe, came into his
mind. He was not only unhappy, but he grew more and more worried about
Ruth.

That went on for several months, and then one day late that same summer
she came to him with the truth. She came because she had to come. He was
a doctor; he was her friend; she was in a girl's most desperate plight
and she had no one else to turn to. It was in his office that she told
him, not looking at him, her face without color and drawn out of shape,
her voice quick, sharp, hard, so unlike Ruth's sweet voice that without
seeing her he would not have known it. She threw out the bare facts at
him as she sat there very straight, hands gripped. He was stupefied at
first, but it was fury which then broke through, the fury of knowing it
was _this_, that not only was he not to have Ruth, but that another man
_had_ her, the fury that rose out of the driving back of all those loose
ends of hope that had eased pain a little. And _Ruth_--_this_! He little
knew what things he might not have said and done in those first moments
of failing her, turning on her because he himself was hurt beyond his
power to bear. And then Ruth spoke to him. "But I thought you believed
in love, Deane," she said, quietly.

"_Love!_" he brutally flung back at her.

"Yes, Deane, love," she said, and the simplicity, the dignity of her
quiet voice commanded him and he had to turn from himself to her. She
was different now; she looked at him, steadily, proudly. Out of the
humiliation of her situation she raised a proud face for love; love
could bring her disgrace, it could not strip her of her own sense of the
dignity of loving. Her power was in that, in that claim for love that
pain and humiliation could not beat back.

"I notice _he's_ not here," he sneered, still too overwhelmed to be won
from his own rage to her feeling.

"I thought it better for me to come," she said simply, and as she said
it and he remembered her drawn, wretched face in telling him, he was
quieted a little by a sense of what it had cost her to come. "Because,"
she added, "you're my friend, you know."

He did not say anything, miserably wondering what she now thought of him
as her friend.

"Oh, Deane," she broke out, "don't be hard! If you could know what he's
suffering! Being a man--being a little older--what's that? If you can
understand me, Deane, you've got to understand him, too!"

He stood there in silence looking at Ruth as, looking away from him now,
she brooded over that. In this hour of her own humiliation her appeal
was for the man who had brought it upon her. "How you love him!" escaped
from him, in bitterness, and yet marvelling.

She turned to him then in her swift way, again, as on that night of his
first seeing, her face transformed by that flaming claim for love; it
was as if life was shining triumphant through the cloud of misery it had
brought down around her. He could not rage against that look; he had no
scorn for it. It lighted a country between them which words could not
have undarkened. They came together there in that common understanding
of the power and beauty of love. He was suddenly ashamed, humbled,
feeling in her love a quality upon which no shameful circumstance could
encroach. And after that she found relief in words, the words she had
had to deny herself so long. It was as if she found it wonderfully good
to talk, in some little measure linking her love, as love wants to link
itself, with the other people of the world, coming within the human
unit. Things which circumstances had prisoned in her heart, too
intensified by solitude, leaped out like winged things let loose. But in
that hour of talking with him, though words served her well, it was that
proud, flaming claim for love which again and again lighted her face
that brought him into understanding, winning him for her against his own
love of her.

In the year which followed, that last year before circumstances closed
in too tight and they went away, it was he who made it possible for Ruth
to move a little more freely in the trap in which she found herself. He
helped her in deceiving her family and friends, aided them in the ugly
work of stealing what happiness they could from the society in which
they lived. He did not like doing it. Neither did he like attending the
agonies of child-birth, or standing impotently at the bed of the dying.
It might seem absurd, in trying to explain one's self, to claim for this
love the inevitability of the beginning and the end of life, and yet,
seeing it as he saw it he did think of it, not as a thing that should or
should not be, but as a thing that was; not as life should or should not
be lived, but as life. This much he knew: that whatever they might have
been able to do at the first, it had them now. They were in too powerful
a current to make a well considered retreat to shoals of safety. No
matter what her mood might have been in the beginning, no matter what
she could have done about it then, Ruth was mastered not master now.
Love _had_ her--he saw that too well to reason with her. What he saw of
the way all other people mattered so much less than the passion which
claimed her made him feel, not that Ruth was selfish, but that the
passion was mastering; the way she deceived made him feel, not that she
was deceitful, but that love like that was as unable to be held back in
the thought of wrong to others as in the consideration of safety for
one's self; the two were equally inadequate floodgates. Not that those
other things did not matter--he knew how they did make her suffer--but
that this one thing mattered overwhelmingly more was what he felt in
Ruth in those days when she would be thought to be with him and would be
with Stuart Williams.

For himself that was a year of misery. He saw Ruth in a peculiarly
intimate way, taken as he was into the great intimacy of her life. His
love for her deepened with his knowing of her; and anxiety about her
preyed upon him all the time, passionate resentment that it should have
gone like that for her, life claiming her only, as it seemed, to destroy
her.

He never admitted to himself how much he really came to like Stuart
Williams. There seemed something quixotic in that; it did not seem
natural he should have any sympathy with this man who not only had
Ruth's love, but was endangering her whole life. Yet the truth was that
as time went on he not only came to like him but to feel a growing
concern for him.

For the man changed in that last year. It was not only that he looked
older--harassed, had grown so much more silent, but Deane as a physician
noticed that he was losing weight and there was a cough that often made
him look at him sharply. A number of times Ruth said, "I don't think
Stuart's well," but she looked so wretched in saying it that he always
laughed at her. The Williams' were not patients of his, so he felt that
professional hesitance, even though he thought it foolish
professionalism, in himself approaching Stuart about his health. Once
when he seemed particularly tired and nervous Deane did venture to
suggest a little lay-off from work, a change, but Stuart had answered
irritably that he couldn't stop work, and didn't want to go away,
anyhow.

It was almost a year after the day Ruth came to him steeled for telling
what had to be told that the man of whom she that day talked came to
tell him what he had been suspecting, that he had tuberculosis and would
have to take that lay-off Deane had been hinting at. It seemed it was
either go away or die, probably, he added, with an attempted laugh, it
was go away and die, but better go away, he thought, than stay there and
give his friends an exhibition in dying.

They talked along over the surface of it, as is people's way, Deane
speaking mildly of tuberculosis, how prevalent, how easily controlled,
how delightful Arizona was, the charms of living out-of-doors, and all
the time each of them knew that the other was not thinking of that at
all, but thinking of Ruth.

Finally, bracing himself as for a thing that was all he could do, Stuart
spoke of her. "Ruth said she was coming in to see you about something
this afternoon. I thought I'd get in first and tell you. I wondered what
you'd think--what we'd better do--"

His voice trailed off miserably. He turned a little away and sat there
in utter dejection.

And as he looked at him it came to Deane that love could be the most
ruthless, most terrible thing in the world. People talked to him
afterwards about this man's selfishness in taking his own pleasure, his
own happiness, at the cost of everyone else. He said little, for how
could he make real to anyone else his own feeling about what he had seen
of the man's suffering, utter misery, as he spoke of the girl to whom he
must bring new pain. Some one spoke to him afterwards of this "light
love" and he laughed in that person's face. He knew that it was love
bathed in pain.

A new sense of just how hideous the whole thing was made him suddenly
demand: "Can't you--_do_ anything about it? Isn't there any _way_?--any
way you can get a divorce?" he bluntly asked.

"Mrs. Williams does not believe in divorce," was the answer, spoken with
more bitterness than Deane had ever heard in any voice before.

Deane turned away with a little exclamation of rage, rage that one
person should have this clutch on the life of another, of two
others--and one of them Ruth--sickened with a sense of the waste and the
folly of it,--for what was _she_ getting out of it? he savagely put to
himself. How could one get anything from life simply by holding another
from it?

"Does she know anything about Ruth?" he asked with an abrupt turn to
Stuart.

"She has mentioned her name several times lately and looked at me in
doing it. She isn't one to speak directly of things," he added with a
more subtle bitterness than that of a moment before. They sat there for
a couple of minutes in silence--a helpless, miserable silence.

When, after that, Deane stepped out into the waiting-room he found Ruth
among those there; he only nodded to her and went back and told Stuart
that she was there. "But it's only three," said he helplessly, "and she
said she was coming at four."

"Well, I suppose she came earlier than she intended," Deane replied,
about as helplessly, and went over and stood looking out the window.
After a moment he turned. "Better get it over with, hadn't you! She's
got to be told," he said, a little less brusquely, as he saw the man
wince,--"better get it over with."

Stuart was silent, head down. After a moment he looked up at Deane. It
was a look one would turn quickly away from. Again Deane stood looking
from the window. He was considering something, considering a thing that
would be very hard to do. After a moment he again abruptly turned
around. "Well, shall I do it!" he asked quietly.

The man nodded in a wretched gratefulness that went to Deane's heart.

So he called Ruth in from the waiting-room. He always remembered just
how Ruth looked that day; she had on a blue suit and a hat with flowers
on it that was very becoming to her. She looked very girlish; he had a
sudden sense of all the years he had known her.

The smile with which she greeted Deane changed when she saw Stuart
sitting there; the instant's pleased surprise went to apprehension at
sight of his face. "What's the matter!" she asked sharply.

"Stuart's rather bummed up, Ruth," said Deane.

Swiftly she moved over to the man she loved. "What is it!" she demanded
in quick, frightened voice.

"Oh, just a bad lung," Deane continued, not looking at them and speaking
with that false cheerfulness so hard fought for and of so little worth.
"Don't amount to much--happens often--but, well--well, you see, he has
to go away--for awhile."

He was bending over his desk, fumbling among some papers. There was no
sound in the room and at last he looked up. Stuart was not looking at
Ruth and Ruth was standing there very still. When she spoke her voice
was singularly quiet. "When shall we go?" she asked.




CHAPTER TWELVE


Everyone who talked about it--and that meant all who knew anything about
it--blamed Deane Franklin for not stopping Ruth. Perhaps the reason he
did not try to defend himself was simply that he could not hope to show
how simple was his acceptance of the fact that it would have been
impossible to stop her. To understand that, one would have to have seen.
Oh, to be sure, he could have put obstacles in her way, tightened it
around her, but anything he might have done would only have gone to
making it harder for Ruth to get away; it would not have kept her from
going. And after all, he himself saw it as, if not the thing she should
do, the thing--it being what it was then--she could not help doing. But
one would have to have seen Ruth's face, would need to have been with
her in those days to understand that.

As to warning her family, as he was so blamed by them and by all the
town for not doing, that would have seemed to him just one of those
things he could have thrown in her way. He did feel that he must try to
talk to her of what it was going to mean to her people; he saw that she
saw, that it had cruel power to make her suffer--and no power to stop
her. Nothing could have stopped her; she was like a maddened
thing--desperate, ruthless, indomitable. She would have fought the
world; she would have let the whole world suffer. Love's fear possessed
her utterly. He had had the feeling all along that it was rushing on to
disaster. He stood back from it now with something like awe: a force not
for him to control.

And he, with it from within, was the only one who did not condemn Stuart
Williams for letting Ruth go. A man, and older than she, they scorned
him for letting an infatuated girl throw her life away like that. And it
was not only that he saw that the man was sick and broken; it was that
he saw that Stuart, just as Ruth, had gone in love beyond his power to
control love, that he was mastered, not master, now. And in those last
days, at least, it was Ruth who dominated him. There was something
terrible in the simplicity with which she saw that she had to go; she
never once admitted it to the things that were to be argued about. He
talked to her, they both tried to talk to her, about the danger of
getting tuberculosis. When he began on that she laughed in his face--and
he could not blame her. As if _that_ could keep her! And as she laughed
her tortured eyes seemed mockingly to put to him--"What difference would
it make?"

When, after it all came out, he did not join the outraged town in the
outcry against Ruth, when it further transpired that he had known about
her going and had not tried to stop it, he was so much blamed that it
even hurt his practice. There were women who said they would not
countenance a young physician who had the ideas of life he must have.
His own people were incensed at what they called the shameful advantage
Ruth had taken of him, holding that she, as an evil woman, had exerted
an influence over him that made him do what was against his own nature.
As to the Hollands, there had been a stormy hour with Mr. Holland and
Cyrus, and a far worse half hour with Mrs. Holland, when her utterly
stricken face seemed to stiffen in his throat the things he wanted to
say for Ruth, things that might have helped Ruth's mother. And then he
was told that the Hollands were through, not alone with Ruth, but with
him.

But he was called there two years later when Mrs. Holland was dying. She
had been begging for him. That moved him deeply because of what in
itself it told of her long yearning for Ruth. After that there were a
number of years when he was not inside that gate. Cyrus did not speak to
him and the father might as well not have done so. He was amazed, then,
when Mr. Holland finally came to him about his own health. "I've come to
you, Deane," he said, "because I think you're the best doctor in town
now--and I need help." And then he added, and after that first talk this
was the closest to speaking of it they ever came: "And I guess you
didn't understand, Deane; didn't see it right. You were young--and
you're a queer one, anyway."

Perhaps the reason he was never able to do better in explaining himself,
or in defending Ruth, was simply because in his own thinking about it
there were never arguments, or thoughts upon conduct, but always just
that memory of Ruth's face as he had seen it in revealing moments.

Everyone saw something that Ruth should have done differently. In the
weeks they spent upon it they found, if not that they would be able to
forgive her, at least that they could think of her with less horror had
she done this, had she not done that. But Ruth lived through that week
seeing little beyond the one thing that she must get through it. She was
driven; she had to go ahead, bearing things somehow, getting through
them. She had a strange power to steel herself, to keep things, for the
most part, from really getting through to her. She could not go ahead if
she began letting things in. She sealed herself over and drove ahead
with the singleness of purpose, the exclusions, of any tormented thing.
It was all terrible, but it was as if she were frozen at the heart to
all save the one thing.

She stayed through the week because it was the time of Edith Lawrence's
wedding and she was to be maid-of-honor. "I'll have to stay till after
Edith's wedding," she said to Deane and Stuart. Then on her way home
from Deane's office she saw that she could not go on with her part in
Edith's wedding. That she could see clearly enough despite the thing
driving her on past things she should be seeing. What would she say to
Edith?--how get _that_ over?

Someone was giving a party for Edith that night; every day now things
were being given for her. She must not go to them. How could she go? It
would be absurd to expect that of herself. She would have to tell Edith
that she could not be her bridesmaid. What a terrible thing Edith would
think that was! She would have to give a reason--a big reason. What
would she tell her?--that she had been called away?--but where? Should
she tell her the truth? Could she? Edith would find it almost
unbelievable. It was almost unbelievable to herself that her life could
be permeated by a thing Edith knew nothing about. It was another of the
things she would have said, had she known her story only through hearing
it, would not be possible. But it was with Edith as it was with her own
family--simply that such a thing would never occur to her. She winced in
thinking of it that way. A number of times she had been right on the
edge of a thing it seemed would surely be disclosing, but it strangely
happened she had never quite gone over that edge. For one thing, Edith
had been away from Freeport a good deal in those three years. Mrs.
Lawrence had opposed Edith's marrying so young, and had taken her to
Europe for one year, and in the last year they had spent part of the
time in California. In the last couple of months, since Edith's return
from the West, she had spoken of Ruth's not seeming like herself, of
fearing she was not well. She had several times hurt Edith's feelings by
refusing, for no apparent reason, to do things with her. But she had
always been able to make that up afterwards and in these plans for the
wedding she and Edith had been drawn close again.

When she went over to the Lawrences' late that afternoon she had decided
that she would tell Edith. It seemed she must. She could not hope to
tell it in a way that would make Edith sympathize. There was not time
for that, and she dared not open herself to it. She would just say it
briefly, without any attempts at justifying it. Something like: "Edith,
there's been something you haven't known. I'm not like you. I'm not what
you think I am. I love Stuart Williams. We've loved each other for a
long time. He's sick. He's got to go away--and I'm going with him.
Good-bye, Edith,--and I hope the wedding goes just beautifully."

But that last got through--got down to the feeling she had been trying
to keep closed, the feeling that had seemed to seal itself over the
moment she saw that she must go with Stuart. "I hope the wedding goes
just beautifully!" Somehow the stiff little phrase seemed to mean all
the old things. There was a moment when she _knew_: knew that she was
walking those familiar streets, that she would not be walking them any
more; knew that she was going over to Edith's--that all her life she had
been going over to Edith's--that she would not be going there any more;
knew that she was going away from home, that she loved her father and
mother--Ted--her grandfather--and Terror, her dog. Realization broke
through and flooded her. She had to walk around a number of blocks
before she dared go to Edith's.

Miss Edith was up in her room, Emma, the maid, said, taking it for
granted that Ruth would go right up. Yes, she always did go right up,
she was thinking. She had always been absolutely at home at the
Lawrences'. They always wanted her; there were times of not wanting to
see anyone else, but it seemed both Edith and her mother always wanted
her. She paused an instant on the stairs, not able to push past that
thought, not able to stay the loving rush of gratefulness that broke out
of the thought of having always been wanted.

She had a confused sense of Edith as barricaded by her trousseau. She
sat behind a great pile of white things; she had had them all out of her
chest for showing to some of her mother's friends, she said, and her
mother had not yet put them back. Ruth stood there fingering a
wonderfully soft chemise. It had come to her that she was not provided
with things like these. What would Edith think of her, going away
without the things it seemed one should have? It seemed to mark the
setting of her apart from Edith, though there was a wave of
tenderness--she tried to hold it back but could not--for dear Edith
because she did have so many things like this.

Edith was too deep in the occupation of getting married to mark an
unusual absorption in her friend. She was full of talk about what her
mother's friends had said of her things, the presents that were coming
in, her dress for the party that night, the flowers for the wedding.

It made Edith seem very young to her. And in her negligee, her hair
down, she looked childish. Her pleasure in the plans for her wedding
seemed like a child's pleasure. It seemed that hurting her in it would
be horribly like spoiling a child's party. Edith's flushed face, her
sparkling eyes, her little excited, happy laugh made it impossible for
Ruth to speak the words she had come to say.

For three days it went on like that: going ahead with the festivities,
constantly thinking she would tell Edith as soon as they got home from
this place or that, waiting until this or that person had gone, then
dumb before the childish quality of Edith's excitement, deciding to wait
until the next morning because Edith was either too happy or too tired
to talk to her that night. That ingenuousness of her friend's pleasure
in her wedding made Ruth feel, not only older, but removed from her by
experience. Those days of her own frozen misery were days of tenderness
for Edith, that tenderness which one well along the road of living feels
for the one just setting feet upon the path.

She was never able to understand how she did get through those days. It
was an almost unbelievable thing that, knowing, she was able, up to the
very last, to go right on with the old things, was able to talk to
people as if nothing were different, to laugh, to dance. There were
times when something seemed frozen in her heart and she could go on
doing the usual things mechanically, just because she knew so well how
to do them; then there were other times when every smallest thing was
stabbed through and through with the consciousness that she would not be
doing it again. And yet even then, she could go on, could appear the
same. They were days of a terrible power for bearing pain. When the
people of the town looked back to it, recalling everything they could
about Ruth Holland in those days, some of them, remembering a tenderness
in her manner with Edith, talked of what a hypocrite she was, while
others satisfied themselves of her utter heartlessness in remembering
her gaiety.

It was two days before the wedding when she saw that she was not going
to be able to tell Edith and got the idea of telling Edith's mother.
Refusing to let herself consider what she would say when she began upon
it, she went over there early that morning--Edith would not be up.

Mrs. Lawrence was at breakfast alone. Ruth kept herself hard against the
welcoming smile, but it seemed she was surely going to cry when, with a
look of concern, Mrs. Lawrence exclaimed: "Why, Ruth dear, how pale you
are!"

She was telling Emma to bring Ruth a cup of coffee, talking of how
absurd it was the way the girls were wearing themselves out, how, for
that reason, she would be glad when it was all over. She spoke with
anxiety of how nervous Edith had grown in the past week, how tired she
was as a result of all the gaiety. "We'll have to be very careful of
her, Ruth," she said. "Don't go to Edith with any worries, will you?
Come to me. The slightest thing would upset Edith now."

Ruth only nodded; she did not know what to say to that; certainly, after
that, she did not know how to say the things she had come to tell. For
what in the world could upset Edith so much as to have her
maid-of-honor, her life-long friend, the girl she cared for most,
refuse, two days before her wedding, to take her part in it?

"And you can do more than anyone else, Ruth," Mrs. Lawrence urged. "You
know Edith counts so on you," she added with an intimate little smile.

And again Ruth only nodded, and bent over her coffee. She had a feeling
of having been caught, of being helpless.

Mrs. Lawrence was talking about the caterer for the wedding; she wished
it were another kind of salad. Then she wanted Ruth to come up and look
at her dress; she wasn't at all satisfied with the touch of velvet they
had put on it. After that some one else came in and Mrs. Lawrence was
called away. Ruth left without saying what she had come to say. She knew
now that she would not say it.

She went home seeing that she must go through with the wedding. It was
too late now to do anything else. Edith would break down--her pleasure
in her wedding spoiled; no, Edith must be spared--helped. She must do
this for Edith. No matter what people thought of her, no matter what
Edith herself thought--though _wouldn't_ she understand? Ruth considered
with a tortured wistfulness--the thing to do now was to go through with
it. Edith must look beautiful at her wedding; her happiness must be
unmarred. Later, when she was away with Will--happy--she could bear it
better. And she would understand that Ruth had wished to spare her; had
done it to help her. She held that thought with her--and drove ahead.

There were moments in those last two days at home when it seemed that
now her heart was indeed breaking: a kindly note in the voice of her
father or mother--one of Ted's teasing jokes--little requests from her
grandfather; then doing things she had done for years and knowing while
doing them that she would not be doing them any more--the last time she
cut the flowers, and then that last night when she went to bed in her
own room, the room she had had ever since old enough to have a room of
her own. She lay there that night and listened to the branches of the
great oak tapping the house. She had heard that sound all her life; it
was associated with all the things of her life; it seemed to be speaking
for all those things--mourning for them. But the closest she came to
actual breaking down was that last day when her dog, laying his head
upon her knee, looked with trust and affection up into her eyes. As she
laid her hand upon his head his eyes seemed to speak for all the love
she had known through all the years. It seemed she could not bear it,
that her heart could not bear it, that she would rather die. But she did
bear it; she had that terrible power for bearing.

If only she had told her mother, they said over and over again. But if
she told her mother she would not go--that was how she saw that; they
would not let her; or rather, she would have no strength left to fight
through their efforts to keep her. And then how could she tell her
mother when her mother would never in the world understand? She did not
believe that her mother could so much as comprehend that she could love
where she should not, that a girl like Ruth--or rather, _Ruth_--could
love a man it was not right she love. She had never talked with her
mother of real things, had never talked with her of the things of her
deepest feeling. She would not know how to do it now, even had she
dared.

Her mother helped her dress for the wedding, talking all the while about
plans for the evening--just who was going to the church, the details
about serving. Ruth clung to the thought that those _were_ the things
her mother was interested in; they always had been, surely they would
continue to be. In her desperation she tried to think that in those
little things her mother cared so much about she would, after a time,
find healing.

With that cruel power for bearing pain she got away from home without
breaking down; she got through that last minute when she realized she
would not see Ted or her grandfather again,--they would not be at the
wedding and would be in bed when she returned from it, and she was to
leave that night on the two o'clock train. It was unbelievable to her
that she had borne it, but she had driven ahead through utter misery as
they commented on her dress, praising her and joking with her. That was
in the living-room and she never forgot just how they were grouped--her
grandfather's newspaper across his knees; Mary, who had worked for them
for years, standing at the door; her dog Terror under the reading
table--Ted walking round and round her. Deane was talking with her
father in the hall. Her voice was sharp as she went out and said: "We
must hurry, Deane."

The wedding was unreal; it seemed that all those people were just making
the movements of life; there were moments when she heard them from a
long way off, saw them and was uncertain whether they were there. And
yet she could go on and appear about the same; if she seemed a little
queer she was sure it was attributed to natural feeling about her
dearest friend's wedding--to emotion, excitement. There were moments
when things suddenly became real: a moment alone with Edith in her room,
just before they went to the church; a moment when Mrs. Lawrence broke
down. Walking down the aisle, the words of the service--that was in a
vague, blurred world; so was Edith's strained face as she turned away,
and her own walking down the aisle with Deane, turning to him and
smiling and saying something and feeling as if her lips were frozen. Yet
for three hours she laughed and talked with people. Mrs. Williams was at
the reception; several times they were in the same group. Oh, it was all
unreal--terrible--just a thing to drive through. There was a moment at
the last when Edith clung to her, and when it seemed that she could not
do the terrible thing she was going to do, that she was _not_ going to
do it--that the whole thing was some hideous nightmare. She wanted to
stay with Edith. She wanted to be like Edith. She felt like a little
girl then, just a frightened little girl who did not want to go away by
herself, away from everything she knew, from people who loved her. She
did not want to do that awful thing! She tried to pretend for a moment
she was not going to do it--just as sometimes she used to hide her face
when afraid.

At last it was all over; she had gone to the train and seen Edith and
Will off for the East. Edith's face was pressed against the window of
the Pullman as the train pulled out. It was Ruth she was looking for; it
was to Ruth her eyes clung until the train drew her from sight.

Ruth stood there looking after the train; the rest of their little group
of intimate friends had turned away--laughing, chattering, getting back
in the carriages. Deane finally touched Ruth's arm, for she was standing
in that same place looking after the train which had now passed from
sight. When he saw the woe of her wet face he said gruffly: "Hadn't we
better walk home?" He looked down at her delicate slippers, but better
walk in them than join the others looking like that. He supposed walking
would not be good for that frail dress; and then it came to him, and
stabbed him, that it didn't much matter. Probably Ruth would not wear
that dress again.

She walked home without speaking to him, looking straight ahead in that
manner she all along had of ruthlessly pressing on to something; her
face now was as if it were frozen in suffering, as if it had somehow
stiffened in that moment of woe when Edith's face was drawn from her
sight. And she looked so tired!--so spent, so miserable; as if she ought
to be cared for, comforted. He took her arm, protectingly, yearningly.
He longed so in that moment to keep Ruth, and care for her! He wanted to
say things, but he seemed to be struck dumb, appalled by what it was
they were about to do. He held her arm close to him. She was going away!
Now that the moment had come he did not know how he was going to let her
go. And looking like this!--suffering like this--needing help.

But he must not fail her now at the last; he must not fail her now when
she herself was so worn, so wretched, was bearing so much. As they
turned in at the gate he fought with all his strength against the
thought that they would not be turning in at that gate any more and
spoke in matter of fact tones of where he would be waiting for her, what
time she must be there. But when they reached the steps they stood there
for a minute under the big tree, there where they had so many times
stood through a number of years. As they stood there things crowded upon
them hard; Ruth raised her face and looked at him and at the anguish of
her swimming eyes his hands went out to her arms. "Don't go, Ruth!" he
whispered brokenly. "Ruth!--_don't go!_"

But that made her instantly find herself, that found the fight in her,
to strengthen herself, to resist him; she was at once erect,
indomitable, the purpose that no misery could shake gleamed through her
wet eyes. Then she turned and went into the house. Her mother called out
to her, sleepily asking if she could get out of her dress by herself.
She answered yes, and then Mrs. Holland asked another sleepy question
about Edith. Then the house was still; she knew that they were all
asleep. She got her dress off and hung it carefully in the closet. She
had already put some things in her bag; she put in a few more now, all
the while sobbing under her breath.

She took off her slippers. After she had done that she stood looking at
her bed. She saw her nightgown hanging in the closet. She wanted to put
on her nightgown and get into bed! She leaned against the bed, crying.
She wanted to put on her nightgown and get into bed! She was so tired,
so frightened, so worn with pain. Then she shook herself, steeled again,
and began putting on her shoes; put on her suit, her hat, got out her
gloves. And then at the very last she had to do what she had been trying
to make herself do all that day, and had not dared begin to do. She went
to her desk and holding herself tight, very rapidly, though with shaking
hand, wrote this note:

     "Dear Mother; I'm going away. I love Stuart Williams. I have for a
     long time. Oh, mother--I'm so sorry--but I can't help it. He's
     sick. He has to go away, so you see I have to go with him. It's
     terrible that it is like this. Mother, try to believe that I can't
     help it. After I get away I can write to you more about it. I can't
     now. It will be terrible for you--for you all. Mother, it's been
     terrible for me. Oh, try not to feel any worse than you can help.
     People won't blame _you_. I wish I could help it. I wish--Can't
     write more now. Write later. I'm so sorry--for everybody. So good
     to me always. I love all--Ruth."

She put her head down on the desk and cried. Finally she got up and
blindly threw the note over on her bed; with difficulty, because of the
shaking of her hands, put on her gloves, picked up her bag. And then she
stood there for a moment before turning off the light; she saw her
little chair, her dressing-table. She reached up and turned off the
light and then for another moment stood there in the darkened room. She
listened to the branches of the oak tree tapping against the house. Then
she softly opened her bedroom door and carefully closed it behind her.
She could hear her father's breathing; then Ted's, as she passed his
door. On the stairs she stood still: she wanted to hear Ted's breathing
again. But she had already gone where she could not hear Ted's
breathing. Her hand on the door, she stood still. There was something so
unreal about this, so preposterous--not a thing that really happened,
that could happen to _her_. It seemed that in just a minute she would
wake up and find herself safe in her bed. But in another minute she was
leaning against the outside door of her home, crying. She seemed to have
left the Ruth Holland she knew behind when she finally walked down the
steps and around the corner where Deane was waiting for her.

They spoke scarcely a word until they saw the headlight of her train.
And then she drew back, clinging to him. "Ruth!" he whispered, holding
her, "don't!" But that seemed to make her know that she must; she
straightened, steeled herself, and moved toward the train. A moment
later she was on the platform, looking down at him. When she tried to
smile good-by, he whirled and walked blindly away.

She did not look from the window as long as the lights of the town were
to be seen. She sat there perfectly still, hands tight together, head
down. For two hours she scarcely moved. Such strange things shot through
her mind. Maybe her mother, thinking she was tired, would not go to her
room until almost noon. At least she would have her coffee first. Had
she remembered to put Edith's handkerchiefs in her bag? Had anyone else
noticed that the hook at the waist of Edith's dress had come unfastened?
Edith was on a train too--going the other way. How strange it all was!
How terrible beyond belief! Just as she neared the junction where she
would meet Stuart and from which they would take the train South
together, the thought came to her that none of the rest of them might
remember always to have water in Terror's drinking pan. When she stepped
from the train she was crying--because Terror might want a drink and
wonder why she was not there to give it to him. He would not
understand--and oh, he would miss her so! Even when Stuart, stepping
from the darkness to meet her, drew her to him, brokenly whispering
passionate, grateful words, she could not stop crying--for Terror, who
would not understand, and who would miss her so! He became the whole
world she knew--loving, needing world, world that would not understand,
and would miss her so!

The woman who, on that train from Denver, had been drawn into this story
which she had once lived was coming now into familiar country. She would
be home within an hour. She had sometimes ridden this far with Deane on
his cases. Her heart began to beat fast. Why, there was the very grove
in which they had that picnic! She could scarcely control the excitement
she felt in beginning to find old things. There was something so strange
in the old things having remained there just the same when she had
passed so completely away from them. Seeing things she knew brought the
past back with a shock. She could hardly get her breath when first she
saw the town. And there was the Lawrences'! Somehow it was unbelievable.
She did not hear the porter speaking to her about being brushed off; she
was peering hungrily from the window, looking through tears at the town
she had not seen since she left it that awful night eleven years before.
She was trembling as she stood on the platform waiting for the slowing
train to come to a stop. There was a moment of wanting to run back in
the car, of feeling she could not get off.

The train had stopped; the porter took her by the arm, thinking by her
faltering that she was slipping. She took her bag from him and stood
there, turned a little away from the station crowd.

Ted Holland had been waiting for that train, he also with fast beating
heart; he too was a little tremulous as he hurried down to the car, far
in the rear, from which passengers were alighting from the long train.
He scanned the faces of the people who began passing him. No, none of
them was Ruth. His picture of Ruth was clear, though he had not seen her
for eleven years. She would be looking about in that eager way--that
swift, bright way; when she saw him there would be that glad nodding of
her head, her face all lighting up. Though of course, he told himself,
she would be older, probably a little more--well, dignified. The romance
that secretly hung about Ruth for him made him picture her as unlike
other women; there would be something different about her, he felt.

The woman standing there half turned from him was oddly familiar. She
was someone he knew, and somehow she agitated him. He did not tell
himself that that was Ruth--but after seeing her he was not looking at
anyone else for Ruth. This woman was not "stylish looking." She did not
have the smart look of most of the girls of Ruth's old crowd. He had
told himself that Ruth would be older--and yet it was not a woman he had
pictured, or rather, it was a woman who had given all for love, not a
woman who looked as if she had done just the things of women. This woman
stooped a little; care, rather than romance, had put its mark upon her;
instead of the secretly expected glamour of those years of love there
had been a certain settling of time. He knew before he acknowledged it
that it was Ruth, knew it by the way this woman made him feel. He came
nearer; she had timidly--not with the expected old swiftness--started in
the direction he was coming. She saw him--knew him--and in that rush of
feeling which transformed her anything of secret disappointment was
swept from him.

He kissed her, as sheepishly as a brother would any sister, and was soon
covering his emotion with a practical request for her trunk check. But
as they walked away the boy's heart was strangely warmed. Ruth was back!

As to Ruth, she did not speak. She could not.




CHAPTER THIRTEEN


It was the afternoon of Ruth Holland's return to Freeport that Edith
Lawrence--now Edith Lawrence Blair--was giving the tea for Deane
Franklin's bride and for Cora Albright, introducing Amy to the society
of the town and giving Cora another opportunity for meeting old friends.
"You see Cora was of our old crowd," Edith was laughingly saying to one
of the older women in introducing her two guests of honor, "and Amy has
married into it." She turned to Amy with a warm little smile and nod, as
if wanting to assure her again that they did look upon her as one of
them.

They had indeed given her that sense of being made one of them. Their
quick, warm acceptance of her made them seem a wonderfully kindly
people. Her heart warmed to them because of this going out to her, a
stranger. That informality and friendliness which in a society like
theirs prevails well within the bounds made them seem to her a people of
real warmth. She was pleased with the thought of living among them,
being one of them; gratified, not only in the way they seemed to like
her, but by the place they gave her. There were happy little
anticipations of the life just opening up. She was flushed with pleasure
and gratification.

She was seeing the society of the town at its best that afternoon; the
women who constituted that society were there, and at their best. For
some reason they always were at their best at the Lawrences', as if
living up to the house itself, which was not only one of the most
imposing of the homes of that rich little middle-western city, but had
an atmosphere which other houses, outwardly equally attractive, lacked.
Mrs. Lawrence had taste and hospitality; the two qualities breathed
through her house. She and Edith were Freeport's most successful
hostesses. The society of that town was like the particular thing known
as society in other towns; not distinguished by any unique thing so much
as by its likeness to the thing in general. Amy, knowing society in
other places, in a larger place, was a little surprised and much pleased
at what she recognized.

And she felt that people were liking her, admiring her, and that always
put her at her best. Sometimes Amy's poise, rare in one so young, made
her seem aloof, not cordial, and she had not been one to make friends
quickly. Edith's friendliness had broken through that; she talked more
than was usual with her--was gayer, more friendly. "You're making a
great hit, my dear," Edith whispered to her gayly, and Amy flushed with
pleasure. People about the room were talking of how charming she was; of
there being something unusual in that combination of girlishness
and--they called it distinction; had Amy been in different mood they
might have spoken of it less sympathetically as an apparent feeling of
superiority. But she felt that she was with what she called her own
sort, and she was warmed in gratification by the place given herself.

She was gayly telling a little group of an amusing thing that had
happened at her wedding when she overheard someone saying to Edith, by
whom she was standing: "Yes, on the two o'clock train. I was down to see
Helen off, and saw her myself--walking away with Ted."

Amy noticed that the other women, who also had overheard, were only
politely appearing to be listening to her now, and were really
discreetly trying to hear what these two were saying. She brought her
story to a close.

"You mean Ruth Holland?" one of the women asked, and the two groups
became one.

Amy drew herself up; her head went a little higher, her lips tightened;
then, conscious of that, she relaxed and stood a little apart, seeming
only to be courteously listening to a thing in which she had no part.
They talked in lowered tones of how strange it seemed to feel Ruth was
back in that town. They had a different manner now--a sort of carefully
restrained avidity. "How does she look?" one of the women asked in that
lowered tone.

"Well," said the woman who had been at the train, "she hasn't kept
herself _up_. Really, I was surprised. You'd think a woman in her
position would make a particular effort to--to make the most of herself,
now, wouldn't you? What else has she to go on? But really, she wasn't at
all good style, and sort of--oh, as if she had let herself _go_, I
thought. Though,"--she turned to Edith in saying this--"there's that
same old thing about her; I saw her smile up at Ted as they walked
away--and she seemed all different then. You know how it always used to
be with Ruth--so different from one minute to another."

Edith turned away, rather abruptly, and joined another group. Amy could
not make out her look; it seemed--why it seemed pain; as if it hurt her
to hear what they were saying. Could it be that she still
_cared_?--after the way she had been treated? That seemed impossible,
even in one who had the sweet nature Mrs. Blair certainly had.

While the women about her were still talking of Ruth Holland, Amy saw
Stuart Williams' wife come out of the dining room and stand there alone
for a minute looking about the room. It gave her a shock. The whole
thing seemed so terrible, so fascinatingly terrible. And it seemed
unreal; as a thing one might read or hear about, but not the sort of
thing one's own life would come anywhere near. Mrs. Williams' eyes
rested on their little group and Amy had a feeling that somehow she knew
what they were talking about. As her eyes followed the other woman's
about the room she saw that there were several groups in which people
were drawn a little closer together and appeared to be speaking a little
more intimately than was usual upon such an occasion. She felt that Mrs.
Williams' face became more impassive. A moment later she had come over
to Amy and was holding out her hand. There seemed to Amy something very
brave about her, dignified, fine, in the way she went right on, bearing
it, holding her own place, keeping silence. She watched her leave the
room with a new sense of outrage against that terrible woman--that woman
Deane stood up for! The resentment which in the past week she had been
trying to put down leaped to new life.

The women around her resumed their talk: of Mrs. Williams, the Holland
family, of the night of Edith's wedding when--in that very house--Ruth
Holland had been there up to the very last minute, taking her place with
the rest of them. They spoke of her betrayal of Edith, her deception of
all her friends, of how she was the very last girl in the world they
would have believed it of.

A little later, when she and Edith were talking with some other guests,
Ruth Holland was mentioned again. "I don't want to talk of Ruth," Edith
said that time; "I'd rather not." There was a catch in her voice and one
of the women impulsively touched her arm. "It was so terrible for you,
dear Edith," she murmured.

"Sometimes," said Edith, "it comes home to me that it was pretty
terrible for Ruth." Again she turned away, leaving an instant's pause
behind her. Then one of the women said, "I think it's simply wonderful
that Edith can have anything but bitterness in her heart for Ruth
Holland! Why there's not another person in town--oh, except Deane
Franklin, of course--"

She caught herself, reddened, then turned to Amy with a quick smile.
"And it's just his sympathetic nature, isn't it? That's exactly
Deane--taking the part of one who's down."

"And then, too, men feel differently about those things," murmured
another one of the young matrons of Deane's crowd.

Their manner of seeming anxious to smooth something over, to get out of
a difficult situation, enraged Amy, not so much against them as because
of there being something that needed smoothing over, because Deane had
put himself and her in a situation that was difficult. How did it
look?--what must people think?--his standing up for a woman the whole
town had turned against! But she was saying with what seemed a sweet
gravity, "I'm sure Deane would be sorry for any woman who had been
so--unfortunate. And she," she added bravely, "was a dear old friend,
was she not?"

The woman who had commiserated with Edith now nodded approval at Amy.
"You're sweet, my dear," she said, and the benign looks of them all made
her feel there was something for her to be magnanimous about, something
queer. Her resentment intensified because of having to give that
impression of a sweet spirit. And so people talked about Deane's
standing up for this Ruth Holland! _Why_ did they talk?--just what did
they say? "There's more to it than I know," suspicion whispered. In that
last half hour it was hard to appear gracious and interested; she saw a
number of those little groups in which voices were low and faces were
trying not to appear eager.

She wished she knew what they were saying; she had an intense desire to
hear more about this thing which she so resented, which was so roiling
to her. It fascinated as well as galled her; she wanted to know just how
this Ruth Holland looked, how she had looked that night of the wedding,
what she had said and done. The fact of being in the very house where
Ruth Holland had been that last night she was with her friends seemed to
bring close something mysterious, terrible, stirring imagination and
curiosity. Had she been with Deane that night? Had he taken her to the
wedding?--taken her home? She hardened to him in the thought of there
being this thing she did not know about. It began to seem he had done
her a great wrong in not preparing her for a thing that could bring her
embarrassment. Everyone else knew about it! Coming there a bride, and
the very first thing encountering something awkward! She persuaded
herself that her pleasure in this party, in this opening up of her life
there, was spoiled, that Deane had spoiled it. And she tormented herself
with a hundred little wonderings.

She and Cora Albright went home together in Edith's brougham. Cora was
full of talk of Ruth Holland, this new development, Ruth's return,
stirring it all up again for her. Amy's few discreet questions brought
forth a great deal that she wanted to know. Cora had a worldly manner,
and that vague sympathy with evil that poetizes one's self without doing
anything so definite as condoning, or helping, the sinner.

"I do think," she said, with a little shrug, "that the town has been
pretty hard about it. But then you know what these middle-western towns
are." Amy, at this appeal to her sophistication, gravely nodded. "I do
feel sorry for Ruth," Cora added in a more personal tone.

"Will you go to see her?" Amy asked, rather pointedly.

"Oh, I couldn't do that," replied Cora. "My family--you know,--or
perhaps you don't know. I'm related to Mrs. Williams," she laughed.

"Oh!" Amy ejaculated, aghast, and newly fascinated by the horror, what
somehow seemed the impossibleness of the whole thing--that she should be
talking of Ruth Holland to a woman related to Mrs. Williams!

"I suppose _she_ felt terribly," Amy murmured.

Cora laughed a little. "Oh, I don't know. It never seemed to me that
Marion would do much feeling. Feeling is so--ruffling."

"She looks," said Amy, a little aggressively, "as though she might not
show all she feels."

"Oh, I suppose not," Cora agreed pleasantly. "Perhaps I do Marion an
injustice. She may have suffered in silence. Certainly she's kept
silence. Truth is, I never liked her so very well. I like Ruth much the
better of the two. I like warmth--feeling."

She was leaning forward and looking from the window. "That's the
Hollands'," she said. And under her breath, compassionately, she
murmured, "Poor Ruth!"

"I should think you _would_ go and see her," said Amy, curiously
resentful of this feeling.

With a little sigh Cora leaned back in the luxurious corner. "We're not
free to do what we might like to do in this life," she said, looking
gravely at Amy and speaking as one actuated by something larger than
personal feeling. "Too many people are associated with me for me to go
and see Ruth--as, for my own part, I'd gladly do. You see it's even
closer than being related to Marion. Cyrus Holland,--Ruth's
brother--married into my family too. Funny, isn't it?" she laughed at
Amy's stare. "Yes, Cyrus Holland married a second cousin of Stuart
Williams' wife."

"Why--" gasped Amy, "it's positively weird, isn't it?"

"Things are pretty much mixed up in this world," Cora went on, speaking
with that good-natured sophistication which appealed to Amy as worldly.
"I think one reason Cy was so bitter against Ruth, and kept the whole
family so, was the way it broke into his own plans. He was in love with
Louise at the time Ruth left; of course all her kith and kin--being also
Marion's--were determined she should not marry a Holland. Cy thought he
had lost her, but after a time, as long as no one was quite so bitter
against Ruth as he, the opposition broke down a little--enough for
Louise to ride over it. Oh, yes, in these small towns everybody's
somehow mixed up with everyone else," she laughed. "And of course," she
went on more gravely, "that is where it is hard to answer the people who
seem so hard about Ruth. It isn't just one's self, or even just one's
family--though it broke them pretty completely, you know; but a thing
like that reaches out into so many places--hurts so many lives."

"Yes," said Amy, "it does." She was thinking of her own life, of how it
was clouding her happiness.

"One has to admit," said Cora, in the tone of summing it all up, "that
just taking one's own happiness is thorough selfishness. Society as a
whole is greater than the individual, isn't it?"

That seemed to Amy the heart of it. She felt herself as one within
society, herself faithful to it and guarding it against all who would do
it harm; hard to the traitor, not because of any personal feeling--she
wished to make that clear to herself--but because society as a whole
demanded that hardness. After she had bade Cora good-by and as she was
about to open the door of the house Deane had prepared for her, she told
herself that it was a matter of taking the larger view. She was pleased
with the phrase; it seemed to clear her own feeling of any possible
charge of smallness.




CHAPTER FOURTEEN


Despite the fact that he knew he was going to be late getting home for
dinner, Dr. Franklin was sending his car very slowly along the
twelve-mile stretch of road that lay between him and home. This was not
so much because it was beautiful country through which he went, and the
spring freshness in the softness of late afternoon was grateful to him,
nor because too tired for any kind of hurrying, as it was that he did
not want to cover those twelve miles before he had thought out what he
was going to say to Amy.

He had seen Ruth that afternoon. He went, as usual, to see her father,
and as he entered the room Ruth was sitting beside the bed. She sat with
her back to him and did not seem to know at once that he was there. She
was bending forward, elbow on her knee, hand to her face, looking at her
father who was asleep, or, rather, in that stupor with which death
reaches out into life, through which the living are drawn to the dead.
She was sitting very still, intent, as she watched the man whom life was
letting go.

He had not seen Ruth since that night, eleven years before, when she
clung to him as she saw the headlight of her train, then turned from him
to the car that was to carry her away from the whole world she knew. It
had seemed that the best of life was pulling away from him as he heard
her train pull out. He fairly ran away from the sound of it; not alone
because it was taking Ruth out of his own life, but because it was
bearing her to a country where the way would be too hard.

He knew that that way had been hard, that the years had not spared her;
and yet there had been a little shock when he saw Ruth that afternoon;
he knew now that his fears for her had rather given themselves a color
of romance. She looked worn, as if she had worked, and, just at first,
before she saw him, she looked older than it would seem that number of
years should make her.

But when she heard him and turned, coming to him with outstretched hand,
it was as it used to be--feeling illumining, transforming her. She was
the old flaming Ruth then, the years that lined her defied. Her eyes--it
was like a steady light shining through trembling waters. No one else
ever gave him that impression Ruth did of a certain deep steadiness
through changing feeling. He had thought he remembered just how
wonderful Ruth's eyes were--how feeling flamed in them and that steady
understanding looked through from her to him--that bridge between
separateness. But they were newly wonderful to him,--so live, so tender,
so potent.

She had been very quiet; thinking back to it, he pondered that. It
seemed not alone the quiet that comes with the acceptance of death, the
quiet that is the subduing effect of strange or moving circumstances,
but an inner quiet, a quiet of power. The years had taken something from
Ruth, but Ruth had won much from them. She was worn, a little dimmed,
but deepened. A tragedy queen she was not; he had a little smile for
himself for that subconscious romantic expectation that gave him, just
at the first, a little shock of disappointment when he saw Ruth. A
tragedy queen would hold herself more imposingly--and would have taken
better care of her hands. But that moment of a lighted way between Ruth
and him could let him afford to smile at disappointed romantic
expectation.

He had been there for only a few minutes, having the long trip out in
the country to make. Ruth and Ted seemed to be alone in the house. He
asked her if she had seen Harriett, and she answered, simply, "Not yet."

She had said, "You're married, Deane--and happy. I'm so glad." That,
too, she had said very simply; it was real; direct. As he thought of it
now it was as if life had simplified her; she had let slip from her,
like useless garments, all those blurring artificialities that keep
people apart.

As usual he would go over again that evening to see his patient; and
then he would remain for a visit with Ruth. And he wanted to take Amy
with him. He would not let himself realize just how much he wanted to do
that, how much he would hate not doing it. He was thinking it out,
trying to arrive at the best way of putting it to Amy. If only he could
make it seem to her the simple thing it was to him!

He would be so happy to do this for Ruth, but it was more than that; it
was that he wanted to bring Amy within--within that feeling of his about
Ruth. He wanted her to share in that. He could not bear to leave it a
thing from which she was apart, to which she was hostile. He could not
have said just why he felt it so important Amy become a part of what he
felt about Ruth.

When at last they were together over their unusually late dinner the
thing he wanted to say seemed to grow more difficult because Amy was so
much dressed up. In her gown of that afternoon she looked so much the
society person that what he had in mind somehow grew less simple. And
there was that in her manner too--like her clothes it seemed a society
manner--to make it less easy to attempt to take her into things outside
the conventional round of life. He felt a little helpless before this
self-contained, lovely young person. She did not seem easy to get at.
Somehow she seemed to be apart from him. There was a real wistfulness in
his desire to take her into what to him were things real and important.
It seemed if he could not do that now that Amy would always be a little
apart from him.

Her talk was of the tea that afternoon: who was there, what they wore,
what they had said to her, how the house looked; how lovely Mrs.
Lawrence and Edith were.

What he was thinking was that it was Ruth's old crowd had assembled
there--at Edith's house--to be gracious to Amy that afternoon. She
mentioned this name and that--girls Ruth had grown up with, girls who
had known her so well, and cared for her. And Ruth? Had they spoken of
her? Did they know she was home? If they did, did it leave them all
unmoved? He thought of the easy, pleasant way life had gone with most of
those old friends of Ruth's. Had they neither the imagination nor the
heart to go out in the thought of the different thing it had been to
her?

He supposed not; certainly they had given no evidence of any such
disposition. It hardened him against them. He hated the thought of the
gay tea given for Amy that afternoon when Ruth, just back after all
those years away, was home alone with her father, who was dying. Amy
they were taking in so graciously--because things had gone right with
her; Ruth, whom they knew, who had been one of them, they left
completely out. There flamed up a desire to take Amy with him, as
against them, to show them that she was sweeter and larger than they,
that she understood and put no false value on a cordiality that left the
heart hard.

But Amy looked so much one of them, seemed so much one with them in her
talk about them, that he put off what he wanted to say, listening to
her. And yet, he assured himself, that was not the whole of Amy; he
softened and took heart in the thought of her tenderness in moments of
love, her sweetness when the world fell away and they were man and woman
to each other. Those real things were stronger in her than this crust of
worldliness. He would reach through that to the life that glowed behind
it. If he only had the skill, the understanding, to reach through that
crust to the life within, to that which was real, she would understand
that the very thing bringing them their happiness was the thing which in
Ruth put her apart from her friends; she would be larger, more tender,
than those others. He wanted that triumph for her over them. He would
glory in it so! There would be such pride in showing Amy to Ruth as a
woman who was real. And most of all, because it was a thing so deep in
his own life, he wanted Amy to come within, to know from within, his
feeling about Ruth.

"You know, dear, that was Ruth's old crowd you were meeting this
afternoon," he finally said.

He saw her instantly stiffen. Her mouth looked actually hard. That, he
quickly told himself, was what those people had done to her.

"And that house," he went on, his voice remaining quiet, "was like
another home to Ruth."

Amy cleared her throat. "She didn't make a very good return for the
hospitality, do you think?" she asked sharply.

Flushing, he started to reply to that, but instead asked abruptly, "Does
Edith know that Ruth is home?"

"Yes," Amy replied coldly, "they were speaking of her."

"_Speaking_ of her!" he scoffed.

"I suppose _you_ would think," she flamed, "that they ought to have met
her at the train!"

"The idea doesn't seem to me preposterous," he answered.

Feeling the coldness in his own voice he realized how he was at the very
start getting away from the thing he wanted to do, was estranging Amy by
his resentment of her feeling about a thing she did not understand.
After all--as before, he quickly made this excuse for her--what more
natural than that she should take on the feeling of these people she was
thrown with, particularly when they were so very kindly in their
reception of her?

"Dear," he began again, "I saw Ruth this afternoon. She seems so alone
there. She's gone through such--such hard things. It's a pretty sad
homecoming for her. I'm going over there again this evening, and, Amy
dear, I do so want you to go with me."

Amy did not reply. He had not looked at her after he began speaking--not
wanting to lose either his courage or his temper in seeing that
stiffening in her. He did not look at her now, even though she did not
speak.

"I want you to go, Amy. I ask you to. I want it--you don't know how
much. I'm terribly sorry for Ruth. I knew her very well, we were very
close friends. Now that she is here, and in trouble--and so lonely--I
want to take my wife to see her."

As even then she remained silent, he turned to her. She sat very
straight; red spots burned in her cheeks and there was a light in her
eyes he had never seen there before. She pushed back her chair
excitedly. "And may I ask,"--her voice was high, tight,--"if you see
nothing insulting to your wife in this--proposal?"

For an instant he just stared at her. "Insulting?" he faltered. "I--I--"
He stopped, helpless, and helplessly sat looking at her, sitting erect,
breathing fast, face and eyes aflame with anger. And in that moment
something in his heart fell back; a desire that had been dear to him, a
thing that had seemed so beautiful and so necessary, somehow just crept
back where it could not be so much hurt. At the sight of her, hard,
scornful, so sure in her hardness, that high desire of his love that she
share his feeling fell back. And then to his disappointment was added
anger for Ruth; through the years anger against so many people had
leaped up in him because of their hardness to Ruth, that, as if of
itself, it leaped up against Amy now.

"No," he said, his voice hard now too, "I must say I see nothing
insulting in asking you to go with me to see Ruth Holland!"

"Oh, you don't!" she cried. "A woman living with another woman's
husband! Why, this very afternoon I was with the wife of the man that
woman is living with!--_she_ is the woman I would meet! And you can ask
me--your wife--to go and see a woman who turned her back on society--on
decency--a woman her own family cast out, and all decent people turn
away from." She paused, struggling, unable to keep her dignity and yet
say the things rushing up to be said.

He had grown red, as he always did when people talked that way about
Ruth. "Of course,"--he made himself say it quietly--"she isn't those
things to me, you know. She's--quite other things to me."

"I'd like to know what she _is_ to you!" Amy cried. "It's very
strange--your standing up for her against the whole town!"

He did not reply; it was impossible to tell Amy, when she was like this,
what Ruth had been--was--to him.

She looked at him as he sat there silent. And this was the man she had
married!--a man who could treat her like this, asking her to go and see
a woman who wasn't respectable--why, who was as far from respectable as
a woman could be! This was the man for whom she had left her mother and
father--and a home better than this home certainly,--yes, and that other
man who had wanted her and who had so much more to offer! _He_ respected
her. He would never ask her to go and see a woman who wasn't decent! But
she had married for love; had given up all those other things that she
might have love. And now.... Her throat tightened and it was hard to
hold back tears. And then suddenly she wanted to go over to Deane, slip
down beside him, put her arms around him, tell him that she loved him
and ask him to please tell her that he loved her. But there was so
strange an expression on his face; it checked that warm, loving impulse,
holding her where she was, hard. What was he thinking about--_that
woman_? He had so strange a look. She did not believe it had anything to
do with her. No, he had forgotten her. It was this other woman. Why, he
was in love with her--of course! He had always been in love with her.

Because it seemed the idea would break her heart, because she could not
bear it, it was scoffingly that she threw out: "You were in love with
her, I suppose? You've always been in love with her, haven't you?"

"Yes, Amy," he answered, "I was in love with Ruth. I loved her--at any
rate, I sorrowed for her--until the day I met you."

His voice was slow and sad; the whole sadness of it all, all the sadness
of a world in which men and women loved and hurt each other seemed
closing in around him. He did not seem able to rise out of it, to go out
to her; it was as if his new disappointment brought back all the hurt of
old ones.

Young, all inexperienced in the ways of adjusting love to life, of
saving it for life, the love in her tried to shoot through the self-love
that closed her in, holding her tight. She wanted to follow that
impulse, go over and put her arms around her husband, let her kisses
drive away that look of sadness. She knew that she could do it, that she
ought to do it, that she would be sorry for not having done it, but--she
couldn't. Love did not know how to fight its way through pride.

He had risen. "I must go. I have a number of calls to make. I--I'm sorry
you feel as you do, Amy."

He was not going to explain! He was just leaving her outside it all! He
didn't care for her, really, at all--just took her because he couldn't
get that other woman! Took _her_--Amy Forrester--because he couldn't get
the woman he wanted! Great bands of incensed pride bound her heart now,
closing in the love that had fluttered there. Her face, twisted with
varying emotions, was fairly ugly as she cried: "Well, I must say, I
wish you had told me this before we were married!"

He looked at her in surprise. Then, surprised anew, looked quickly away.
Feeling that he had failed, he tried to put it aside lightly. "Oh, come
now, Amy, you didn't think, did you, that you could marry a man of
thirty-four who had never loved any woman?"

"I should like to think he had loved a respectable woman!" she cried,
wounded anew by this lightness, unable to hold back things she miserably
knew she would be sorry she had not held back. "And if he had loved that
kind of a woman--_did_ love her--I should like to think he had too much
respect for his wife to ask her to meet such a person!"

"Ruth Holland is not a woman to speak like that about, Amy," he said
with unconcealed anger.

"She's not a decent woman! She's not a respectable woman! She's a bad
woman! She's a low woman!"

She could not hold it back. She knew she looked unlovely, knew she was
saying things that would not make her loved. She could not help it.
Deane turned away from her. After a minute he got a little control of
himself and instead of the hot things that had flashed up, said coldly:
"I don't think you know what you're talking about."

"Of course I couldn't hope to know as much as _she_ does," she jeered.
"However," she went on, with more of a semblance of dignity, "I do know
a few things. I know that society cannot countenance a woman who did
what that woman did. I know that if a woman is going to selfishly take
her own happiness with no thought of others she must expect to find
herself outside the lives of decent people. Society must protect itself
against such persons as she. I know that much--fortunately."

Her words fortified her. She, certainly, was in the right. She felt that
she had behind her all those women of that afternoon. Did any of them
receive Ruth Holland? Did they not all see that society must close in
against the individual who defied it? She felt supported.

For the minute he stood there looking at her--so absolutely unyielding,
so satisfied in her conclusions,--those same things about society and
the individual that he had heard from the rest of them; like the rest of
them so satisfied with the law she had laid down--law justifying
hardness of heart and closing in against the sorrow of a particular
human life; from Amy now that same look, those same words. For a little
time he did not speak. "I'm awfully sorry, Amy," was all he said then.

He stood there in miserable embarrassment. He always kissed her good-by.

She saw his hesitancy and turned to the other room. "Hadn't you better
hurry?" she laughed. "You have so many calls to make--and some of them
so important!"




CHAPTER FIFTEEN


It was quiet that evening in the house of Cyrus Holland; the noises that
living makes were muffled by life's awe of death, even sounds that could
not disturb the dying guarded against by the sense of decorum of those
living on. Downstairs were people who had come to inquire for the man
they knew would not be one of them again. For forty years Cyrus Holland
had been a factor in the affairs of the town. He was Freeport's senior
banker, the old-fashioned kind of banker, with neither the imagination
nor the daring to make of himself a rich man, or of his bank an
institution using all the possibilities of its territory. In venturing
days he remained cautious. His friends said that he was
sane--responsible; men of a newer day put it that he was limited,
lacking in that boldness which makes the modern man of affairs. He had
advised many men and always on the side of safety. No one had grown rich
through his suggestions, but more than one had been saved by his
counsels. With the expansion of the business of the town newer banks had
gone ahead of his, and when they said he was one of the good substantial
men of the community they were indicating his limitations with his
virtues. Such a man, not a brilliant figure through his lifetime, would
be lamented in his passing. They had often said that he failed in using
his opportunities; what they said now was that he had never abused
them--death, as usual, inducing the living to turn the kindly side to
the truth about the dying.

Ruth did not go downstairs to see the people who were coming in. Ted was
down there, and Flora Copeland, a spinster cousin of the Hollands, who
for several years had lived in the house. Once, in passing through the
hall, she heard voices which she recognized. She stood there listening
to them. It was so strange to hear them; and so good. She was hungry for
voices she knew--old voices. Once there was a pause and her heart beat
fast for she got a feeling that maybe they were going to ask for her.
But they broke that pause to say goodnight. She had received no message
about anyone asking for her.

But even though she was not seeing the people who came she felt the
added strangeness her presence made in that house which had suspended
the usual affairs of living in waiting for death. The nurse was one of
the girls of the town, of a family Ruth knew. She had been only a little
girl at the time Ruth went away. She was conscious, in the young woman's
scrupulously professional manner toward herself, of a covert interest,
as in something mysterious, forbidden. She could see that to this
decorous young person she was a woman out of another world. It hurt her,
and it made her a little angry. She wished that this professional,
proper young woman, stealing glances as at a forbidden thing, could know
the world in which she actually lived.

And yet it occurred to her that the strain was less great than it would
have been at any other time--something about a room of death making the
living a little less prone to divide themselves into good and bad,
approved and condemned. With the approach of death there are likely to
be only two classes--the living and the dead. After the first few hours,
despite the estranging circumstances, there did seem to be some sort of
a bond between her and this girl who attended her father.

Ruth and Ted and Flora Copeland had had dinner together. Her Cousin
Flora had evidently pondered the difficult question of a manner with
Ruth and was pursuing it scrupulously. Her plan was clearly indicated in
her manner. She would seem to be acting as if nothing had happened and
yet at the same time made it plain that she in no sense countenanced the
person to whom she was being kind. Her manner was that most dismal of
all things--a punctilious kindliness.

This same Cousin Flora, now an anæmic woman of forty-five, had not
always been exclusively concerned with propriety. Ruth could remember
Cousin Flora's love affair, which had so greatly disturbed the members
of the family, and which, to save their own pride, they had thwarted.
Cousin Flora had had the misfortune to fall in love with a man quite
outside the social sphere of the Copelands and the Hollands. He was a
young laboring man whom she knew through the social affairs of the
church. He had the presumption to fall in love with her. She had not had
love before, being less generously endowed in other respects than with
social position in Freeport. There had been a brief, mad time when
Cousin Flora had seemed to find love greater than exclusiveness. But the
undesirable affair was frustrated by a family whose democracy did not
extend beyond a working together for the good of the Lord, and Cousin
Flora was, as Ruth remembered their saying with satisfaction, saved.
Looking at her now Ruth wondered if there ever came times when she
regretted having been saved.

She tried to make the most of all those little things that came into her
mind just because this homecoming was so desolate a thing to be left
alone with. She had many times lived through a homecoming. And when she
had thought of coming home she had always, in spite of it all, thought
of things as much the same. And now even she and Ted were strange with
each other; it was Ted the little boy she knew; it was hard all at once
to bridge years in which they had not shared experiences.

It was the house itself seemed really to take her in. When she got her
first sight of it all the things in between just rolled away. She was
back. What moved her first was not that things had changed but that they
were so much the same--the gate, the walk up to the house, the big tree,
the steps of the porch; as she went up the walk there was the real
feeling of coming home.

Then they stepped up on the porch--and her mother was not there to open
the door for her; she knew then with a poignancy even those first days
had not carried that she would never see her mother again, knew as she
stepped into the house that her mother was gone. And yet it would keep
seeming her mother must be somewhere in that house, that in a little
while she would come in the room and tell something about where she had
been. And she would find herself listening for her grandfather's slow,
uncertain step; and for Terror's bark--one of his wild, glad rushes into
the room. Ted said that Terror had been run over by an automobile a
number of years before.

Nor was it only those whom death kept away who were not there. Her
sister Harriett had not been there to welcome her; now it was evening
and she had not yet seen her. Ted had merely said that he guessed
Harriett was tired out. He seemed embarrassed about it and had hastily
begun to talk of something else. And none of the old girls had come in
to see her. The fact that she had not expected them to come somehow did
not much relieve the hurt of their not coming. When a door opened she
would find herself listening for Edith's voice; there was no putting
down the feeling that surely Edith would be running in soon.

Most of the time she sat by her father's bed; though she was watching
him dying, to sit there by him was the closest to comfort she could
come. And as she watched the face which already had the look of death
there would come pictures of her father at various times through the
years. There was that day when she was a tiny girl and he came home
bringing her a puppy; she could see his laughing face as he held the
soft, wriggling, fuzzy little ball of life up to her, see him standing
there enjoying her delight. She saw him as he was one day when she said
she was not going to Sunday-school, that she was tired of Sunday-school
and was not going any more. She could hear him saying, "Ruth, go
upstairs and put on your clothes for Sunday-school!"--see him as plainly
as though it had just happened standing there pointing a stern finger
toward the stairs, not moving until she had started to obey him. And
once when she and Edith and some other girls were making a great noise
on the porch he had stepped out from the living-room, where he and some
men were sitting about the table, looking over something, and said,
mildly, affectionately, "My dears, what would you think of making a
little less noise?" Queer things to be remembering, but she saw just how
he looked, holding the screen door open as he said it.

And as she sat there thinking of how she would never hear his voice
again, he reached out his hand as if groping for something he wanted;
and when with a little sob she quickly took it he clasped her hand,
putting into it a strength that astonished her. He turned toward her
after that and the nature of his sleep changed a little; it seemed more
natural, as if there were something of peace in it. It was as if he had
turned to her, reached out his hand for her, knowing she was there and
wanting her. He was too far from life for more, but he had done what he
could. Her longing gave the little movement big meaning. Sitting there
holding the hand of her father who would never talk to her nor listen to
her again, she wanted as she had 

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