cross street which was shaded by elm trees. That was the corner where
she had always turned for Edith's. Yes, that was the way she used to go.
She stood looking down the old way. She wanted to go that way now!

She went so far as to cross the street, and on that far corner again
stood still, hesitating, wanting to go that old way. It came to her that
if this other girl--Annie Morris--a girl she could barely remember, was
glad to see her back, then surely Edith--_Edith_--would be glad to see
her. But after a moment she went slowly on--the other way. She
remembered; remembered the one letter she had had from Edith--that
letter of a few lines sent in reply to her two letters written from
Arizona, trying to make Edith understand.

"Ruth"--Edith had written--she knew the few words by heart; "Yes, I
received your first letter. I did not reply to it because it did not
seem to me there was anything for me to say. And it does not seem to me
now that there is anything for me to say." It was signed, "Edith
Lawrence Blair." The full signature had seemed even more formal than the
cold words. It had hurt more; it seemed actually to be putting in force
the decree that everything between her and Edith was at an end. It was
never to be Ruth and Edith again.

As she walked slowly on now, away from Edith's, she remembered the day
she walked across that Arizona plain, looking at Edith's letter a
hundred times in the two miles between the little town and their cabin.
She had gone into town that day to see the doctor. Stuart had seemed
weaker and she was terribly frightened. The doctor did not bring her
much comfort; he said she would have to be patient, and hope--probably
it would all come right. She felt very desolate that day in the
far-away, forlorn little town. When she got Edith's letter she did not
dare to open it until she got out from the town. And then she found
those few formal, final words--written, it was evident, to keep her from
writing any more. The only human thing about it was a little blot under
the signature. It was the only thing a bit like Edith; she could see her
making it and frowning over it. And she wondered--she had always
wondered--if that little blot came there because Edith was not as
controlled, as without all feeling, as everything else about her letter
would indicate. As she looked back to it now it seemed that that day of
getting Edith's letter was the worst day of all the hard years. She had
been so lonely--so frightened; when she saw Edith's handwriting it was
hard not to burst into tears right there at the little window in the
queer general store where they gave out letters as well as everything
else. But after she had read the letter there were no tears; there was
no feeling of tears. She walked along through that flat, almost
unpeopled, half desert country and it seemed that the whole world had
shrivelled up. Everything had dried, just as the bushes along the road
were alive and yet dried up. She knew then that it was certain there was
no reach back into the old things. And that night, after they had gone
to bed out of doors and Stuart had fallen asleep, she lay there in the
stillness of that vast Arizona night and she came to seem in another
world. For hours she lay there looking up at the stars, thinking,
fearing. She reached over and very gently, meaning not to wake him, put
her hand in the hand of the man asleep beside her, the man who was all
she had in the world, whom she loved with a passion that made the
possibility of losing him a thing that came in the night to terrorize
her. He had awakened and understood, and had comforted her with his
love, lavishing upon her tender, passionate assurance of how he was
going to get strong and make it all come right for them both. There was
something terrible in that passion for one another that came out of the
consciousness of all else lost. They had each other--there were moments
when that burned with a terrible flame through the feeling that they had
nothing else. That night they went to sleep in a wonderful consciousness
of being alone together in the world. Time after time that swept them
together with an intensity of which finally they came to be afraid. They
stopped speaking of it; it came to seem a thing not to dwell upon.

The thought of Edith's letter had brought some of that back now. She
turned from it to the things she was passing, houses she recognized, new
houses. Walking on past them she thought of how those homes joined. With
most of them there were no fences between--one yard merging into
another. Children were running from yard to yard; here a woman was
standing in her own yard calling to a woman in the house adjoining. She
passed a porch where four women were sitting sewing; another where two
women were playing with a baby. There were so many meeting places for
their lives; they were not shut in with their own feeling. That feeling
which they as individuals knew reached out into common experiences, into
a life in common growing out of individual things. Passing these houses,
she wanted to share in that life in common. She had been too long by
herself. She needed to be one with others. Life, for a time, had a
certain terrible beauty that burned in that sense of isolation. But it
was not the way. One needed to be one with others.

She thought of how it was love, more than any other thing, that gave
these people that common life. Love was the fabric of it. Love made new
combinations of people--homes, children. The very thing in her that had
shut her out was the thing drawing them into that oneness, that many in
one. Homes were closed to her because of that very impulse out of which
homes were built.

She had, without any plan for doing so, turned down the little street
where she used to go to meet Stuart. And when she realized where she was
going thoughts of other things fell away; the feeling of those first
days was strangely revivified, as if going that old way made her for the
moment the girl who had gone that way. Again love was not a thing of
right or wrong, it was the thing that had to have its way--life's great
imperative. Going down that old street made the glow of those days--the
excitement--come to life and quicken her again. It was so real that it
was as if she were living it again--a girl palpitating with love going
to meet her lover, all else left behind, only love now! For the moment
those old surroundings made the old days a living thing to her. The
world was just one palpitating beauty; the earth she walked was vibrant;
the sweetness of life breathed from the air she breathed. She was
charged with the joy of it, bathed in the wonder. Love had touched her
and taken her, and she was different and everything was different. Her
body was one consciousness of love; it lifted her up; it melted her to
tenderness. It made life joyous and noble. She lived; she loved!

Standing on the spot where they had many times stood in moments of
meeting a very real tenderness for that girl was in the heart of this
woman who had paid so terribly for the girl's love. It brought a feeling
that she had not paid too much, that no paying was ever too much for
love. Love made life; and in turn love was what life was for. To live
without it would be going through life without having been touched
alive. In that moment it seemed no wrong love could bring about would be
as deep as the wrong of denying love. There was again that old feeling
of rising to something higher in her than she had known was there, that
feeling of contact with all the beauty of the world, of being admitted
to the inner sweetness and wonder of life. She had a new understanding
of what she had felt; that was the thing added; that was the gift of the
hard years.

And of a sudden she wanted terribly to see her mother. It seemed if she
could see her mother now that she could make her understand. She saw it
more simply than she had seen it before. She wanted to tell her mother
that she loved because she could not help loving. She wanted to tell her
that after all those years of paying for it she saw that love as the
thing illumining her life; that if there was anything worthy in her,
anything to love, it was in just this--that she had fought for love,
that she would fight for it again. She wanted to see her mother! She
believed she could help the hurt she had dealt.

She had walked slowly on, climbing a little hill. From there she looked
back at the town. With fresh pain there came the consciousness that her
mother was not there, that she could not tell her, that she had
gone--gone without understanding, gone bewildered, broken. Her eyes
dimmed until the town was a blur. She wanted to see her mother!

She was about to start back, but turned for a moment's look the other
way, across that lovely country of little hills and valleys--brooks, and
cattle in the brooks, and fields of many shades of green.

And then her eye fixed upon one thing and after that saw no other thing.
Behind her was the place where the living were gathered together; but
over there, right over there on the next hill, were the dead. She stood
very still, looking over there passionately through dimmed eyes. And
then swiftly, sobbing a little under her breath, she started that way.
She wanted to see her mother!

And when she came within those gates she grew strangely quiet. Back
there in the dwelling place of the living she had felt shut out. But she
did not feel shut out here. As slowly she wound her way to the hillside
where she knew she would find her mother's grave, a strange peace
touched her. It was as if she had come within death's tolerance; she
seemed somehow to be taken into death's wonderful, all-inclusive love
for life. There seemed only one distinction: they were dead and she
still lived; she had a sense of being loved because she still lived.

Slowly, strangely comforted, strangely taken in, she passed the graves
of many who, when she left, had been back there in the place of the
living. The change from dwelling place to dwelling place had been made
in the years she was away. It came with a shock to find some of those
tombstones; she found many she had thought of as back there, a few hills
away, where men still lived. She would pause and think of them, of the
strangeness of finding them here when she had known them there--of
life's onward movement, of death's inevitability. There were stones
marking the burial places of friends of her grandfather--old people who
used to come to the house when she was a little girl; she thought with a
tender pleasure of little services she had done them; she had no feeling
at all that they would not want her to be there. Friends of her father
and mother too were there; yes, and some of her own friends--boys and
girls with whom she had shared youth.

She sat a long time on the hillside where her mother had been put away.
At first she cried, but they were not bitter tears. And after that she
did not feel that, even if she could have talked to her mother, it would
be important to say the things she had thought she wanted to say. Here,
in this place of the dead, those things seemed understood. Vindication
was not necessary. Was not life life, and should not one live before
death came? She saw the monuments marking the graves of the Lawrences,
the Blairs, the Williams', the Franklins,--her mother's and her father's
people. They seemed so strangely one: people who had lived. She looked
across the hills to the town which these people had built. Right beside
her was her grandfather's grave; she thought of his stories of how, when
a little boy, he came with his people to that place not then a town; his
stories of the beginnings of it, of the struggles and conflicts that had
made it what it was. She thought of their efforts, their
disappointments, their hopes, their loves. Their loves.... She felt very
close to them in that. And as she thought of it there rose a strange
feeling, a feeling that came strangely strong and sure: If these people
who had passed from living were given an after moment of consciousness,
a moment when they could look back on life and speak to it, she felt
that their voices, with all the force they could gather, would be raised
for more living. Why did we not live more abundantly? Why did we not
hold life more precious? Were they given power to say just one word,
would they not, seeing life from death, cry--Live!

Twilight came; the world had the sweetness of that hour just before
night. A breeze stirred softly; birds called lovingly--loving life. The
whole fragrance of the world was breathed into one word. It was as if
life had caught the passionate feeling of death; it was as if that after
consciousness of those who had left life, and so knew its preciousness,
broke through into things still articulate. The earth breathed--Live!

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Cyrus Holland died just before daybreak next morning. It seemed to Deane
Franklin that he had only just fallen asleep when the telephone beside
him was ringing. When tired out he slept through other noises, but that
one always instantly reached--a call to him that got through sleep. He
wakened just enough to reach out for the 'phone and his "Hello!" was
cross. Was there never a time when one could be let alone? But the voice
that came to him banished both sleep and irritation. It was Ruth's
voice, saying quietly, tensely: "Deane? I'm sorry--but we want you.
There's a change. I'm sure father's going."

He was dressing almost the instant he hung up the receiver. To Amy, who
had roused, he said: "It's Ruth. Her father's going. I can't do a
thing--but they want me there."

At first Amy made no reply. He thought nothing about that, engrossed in
getting dressed as quickly as possible. When she burst out, "So of
course you're going!" he was dumbfounded at the passionateness of her
voice. He looked at her in astonishment; then, for the first time the
other side of it, as related to their quarrel about Ruth, turned itself
to him. "Why, of course I'm going, Amy," he said quietly.

"It makes a difference who it is, doesn't it?" she cried, stormily. "The
other night when somebody called you and there wasn't a thing you could
do, you _said_ so! You _told_ them they mustn't ask you! But _this_ is
different, isn't it?"

The words had piled up tumultuously; she seemed right on the verge of
angry, tumultuous tears. He paused in what he was doing. "Why, Amy," he
murmured in real astonishment. And then helplessly repeated in tender
reproach, "Why, Amy!"

But she laughed, it seemed sneeringly. He colored, quickly finished
dressing and left the room without saying anything more.

When she heard the front door close, heard Deane running down the steps,
she sat up in bed and burst into tears of rage. Always that woman!
Running away to her in the middle of the night! He didn't _have_ to go!
There was nothing for him to do as a doctor--he could do nothing for a
man who had been dying for a couple of days. He _said_ that--just a
couple of nights before when someone wanted him to come. But this was
Ruth Holland! She had only to telephone. Of course he'd go anywhere--any
time--for her! Her sobs grew more and more passionate. Her head down on
her knees she rocked back and forth in that miserable fury only jealousy
and wounded pride can create.

This gathered together, brought to a head, the resentment accumulating
through a number of incidents. That afternoon she had gone over to the
Lawrences' to thank Edith and her mother for the flowers from the tea
which they had sent her that morning. They had urged her to run in
often, to be friendly. Her unhappiness about her talk with Deane the
night before, when he had actually proposed that she go to see this Ruth
Holland, made her want to be with friends; she wanted to see people who
felt as she did that--though it did not so present itself to her--she
might fortify herself in the conviction that Deane was preposterously
wrong, and she taking the only course a good woman could take in
relation to a bad one. She was prepared to feel that men did not see
those things as clearly as women did, that it was woman who was the
guardian of society, and that she must bear with man in his failure to
see some things right. She had been eager to strengthen herself in that
feeling, not alone because it would, in her own mind, get her out of
reach of any possible charge of hardness or narrowness, but because it
would let her break through her feeling against Deane; she wanted to get
back to the days of his complete adoration of her, back where his
passion for her would sweep all else out of their world. She knew well
enough that Deane loved her, but there was a tightened up place around
her knowing that. It made her miserable. Things would not be right until
she found a way through that tightened up place--a way that would make
her right and Deane wrong, but would let her forgive, largely and gently
understanding. Such, not thought out, were the things that took her to
the Lawrences' that afternoon.

It was apparent that Edith had been crying. She and her mother were
gracious to Amy, but there was a new constraint. She felt uncomfortable.
When they were alone Edith broke out and told her how she was just sick
at heart about Ruth. Deane had been there that morning urging her to go
and see Ruth--instantly there was all anew that tightening up that held
her from Deane, that feeling against him and against this Ruth Holland
that was as if something virulent had been poured into her blood,
changing her whole system. Edith cried as she told how Deane and her
mother had quarreled because he felt so strongly on the subject, and
didn't seem able to understand her mother's standpoint. Then, she too
wanting to set herself right with herself, she went over the whole
story--the shock to her, how it had hurt her ideal of friendship, had
even seemed to take something from the sanctity of her own marriage. She
silenced something within herself in recounting the wrong done her,
fortified herself in repeating the things she had from her mother about
one's not being free, about what the individual owed to society.

Amy went home in a turmoil of resentment against her husband. It was
hard to hold back the angry tears. A nice position he was putting
himself in--going about the town pleading for this woman whom nobody
would take in!--estranging his friends--yes, probably hurting his
practice. And _why_? _Why_ was he so wrought up about it? Why was he
making a regular business of going about fighting her battles? Well,
_one_ thing it showed! It showed how much consideration he had for his
own wife. When she came in sight of their house it was harder than ever
to hold back the tears of mortification, of hot resentment. She had been
so sure she was going to be perfectly happy in that house! Now already
her husband was turning away from her--humiliating her--showing how much
he thought of another woman, and _such_ a woman! She did not know what
to do with the way she felt, did not know how to hold from the surface
the ugly things that surged through her, possessed her. Until now she
had had nothing but adulation from love. A pretty, petted girl she had
formed that idea of pretty women in youth that it was for men to give
love and women graciously to accept it. For her vanity to be hurt by a
man who had roused her passion turned that passion to fury against him
and made it seem that a great wrong had been done her.

As she approached she saw that Deane was standing before the house
talking to a woman in a vegetable wagon. He had one foot up on the spoke
of the wheel and was talking more earnestly than it seemed one would be
talking to a vegetable woman. Doubtless she was one of his patients. As
she came up he said: "Oh, Amy, I want you to know Mrs. Herman."

She stiffened; his tone in introducing her to a woman of what she
thought of as the lower classes seeming just a new evidence of his
inadequate valuation of her.

"Your husband and I went to school together," said Mrs. Herman,
pleasantly, but as if explaining.

"Oh?" murmured Amy.

Deane abruptly moved back from the wagon. "Well, you do that, Annie.
Ruth would love to see you, I know."

So _that_ was it! She turned away with a stiff little nod to the woman
in the wagon. Always the same thing!--urging Tom, Dick and Harry to go
and see that woman!--taking up with a person like this, introducing his
wife in that intimate way to a woman who peddled vegetables just because
she was willing to go and see Ruth Holland! She didn't know that she had
to stand such things!--she didn't know that she _would_. She guessed she
could show him that she wasn't going to play second fiddle to that Ruth
Holland!

Deane came to the door of the room where she was taking off her hat. Her
fingers were trembling so that she could scarcely get the pins. "That
little woman you were so chilly to is a pretty fine sort, Amy," he said
incisively.

"Because she is going to see Ruth Holland?" she retorted with an excited
laugh.

"Oh, you were pretty stand-offish before you knew that," he answered
coolly.

Vanity smarting from deeper hurts made her answer, haughtily: "I'm
rather inexperienced, you know, in meeting people of that class."

In his heart too there were deeper disappointments than this touched.
"Well, I must say--" he began hotly, "I think if I felt as snobbish as
that I'd try pretty hard to conceal it!"

Amy was carefully putting away her hat; she had an appearance of cold
composure, of a sense of superiority. It was because she wanted to keep
that that she did not speak. The things within would so completely have
destroyed it.

"I guess you don't understand, Amy," said Deane, quieted by her silence;
"if you knew all about Annie Morris I think you'd see she is a woman
worth meeting." Thinking of his talk with Edith and her mother that
morning, he added, a good deal of feeling breaking into his voice: "A
good sight more so than some of the people you are meeting!"

"And of course," she could not hold back, "they--those inferior
people--won't go to see Ruth Holland, and this wonderful woman will!
That's the secret of it, isn't it?"

"It's one thing that shows her superiority," he replied coolly. "Another
thing is her pluck--grit. Her husband is a dolt, and she's determined
her three children shall have some sort of a show in life, so she's
driven ahead--worked from daylight till dark many a time--to make decent
things possible for them."

"Well, that's very commendable, I'm sure," replied Amy mildly, appearing
to be chiefly concerned with a loose button on the wrap she had just
taken off.

"And with all that she's kept her own spirit alive; she's not going to
let life get clear ahead of _her_, either. She's pretty valiant, I
think." He was thinking again of Edith and her mother as he added
contentiously, "I don't know any woman in this town I'd rather talk to!"

Amy, appearing quite outside the things that were disturbing him, only
smiled politely and threaded a needle for sewing on the button. He stood
there in the doorway, fidgeting, his face red. She seemed so uncaring;
she seemed so far away. "Oh, Amy!" he cried, miserably, appealingly.

Quickly she looked up; her mouth, which had been so complacent,
twitched. He started toward her, but just then the doorbell rang. "I
presume that's your mother," she said, in matter of fact tone.

Mrs. Franklin was with them for dinner that night. Amy's social training
made it appear as if nothing were disturbing her. She appeared wholly
composed, serene; it was Deane who seemed ill at ease, out of sorts.

After dinner he had to go to the hospital and when she was alone with
his mother Amy was not able to keep away from the subject of Ruth
Holland. For one thing, she wanted to hear about her, she was avid for
detail as to how she looked, things she had done and said--that curious
human desire to press on a place that hurts. And there was too the
impulse for further self-exoneration, to be assured that she was right,
to feel that she was injured.

All of those things it was easy to get from Mrs. Franklin. Amy, not
willing to reveal what there had been between her and Deane, and having
that instinct for drawing sympathy to herself by seeming
self-depreciation, spoke gently of how she feared she did not altogether
understand about Deane's friend Ruth Holland. Was she wrong in not going
with Deane to see her?

Mrs. Franklin's explosion of indignation at the idea, and the feeling
with which, during the hour that followed, she expressed herself about
Deane's friend Ruth Holland, acted in a double fashion as both
fortification and new hurt. Mrs. Franklin, leader in church and
philanthropic affairs, had absolutely no understanding of things which
went outside the domain of what things should be. The poor and the
wicked did terrible things that society must do something about. There
was no excuse whatever for people who ought to know better. That people
should be dominated by things they ought not to feel was perversity on
their part and the most wilful kind of wickedness. She had Mrs.
Lawrence's point of view, but from a more provincial angle. Deane did
not get his questioning spirit, what she called his stubbornness, from
his mother.

Added to what she as a church woman and worker for social betterment
felt about the affair was the resentment of the mother at her son's
having been, as she put it, dragged into the outrage. She grew so
inflamed in talking of how this woman had used Deane that she did not
take thought of how she was giving more of an impression of her power
over him than might be pleasant hearing for Deane's young wife. The
indignation of the whole Franklin family at what they called the way
Deane had been made a cat's paw was fanned to full flame in this
preposterous suggestion that Amy should go to see Ruth Holland. In her
indignation at the idea she gave a new sense of what the town felt about
Ruth, and she was more vehement than tactful in her expressions against
Deane for holding out that way against the whole town. "It just shows,
my dear," she said, "what a woman of no principle can do with a man!"

Amy, hurt to the quick in this thought of the mysterious lure of a woman
of no principle, remarked casually, "She's wonderfully attractive, I
presume."

Mrs. Franklin was not too blunted by indignation to miss the pain that
was evident in the indifferently asked question. Hastily--more hastily
than subtly, she proceeded to depreciate the attractions of Ruth
Holland, but in the depreciation left an impression of some
quality--elusive, potent--which more than beauty or definite charm gave
her power. Edith too had spoken of that "something" about Ruth; a
something one never forgot; a something, she said, that no one else had.

And now, awakened by Deane's having been called by this woman in the
night, herself alone there and he hurrying to Ruth Holland, the barriers
of pride broke down and she cried because she was sorry for herself,
because she was hurt and outraged that she should be hurt, because for
the first time in her whole life she was thwarted--not having her way,
set aside. She completely lost her hold on herself, got up and stormed
about the room. When she looked at her face in the mirror she saw that
it was hideous. She couldn't help it!--she didn't care! The resentment,
rage, in her heart was like a poison that went all through her. She was
something that didn't seem herself. She thought horrible things and
ground her teeth and clenched her hands and let her face look as ugly as
it could. She hated this woman! She wished some horrible thing would
happen to her! She hated Deane Franklin! The passion he had roused in
her all turned into this feeling against him. She wouldn't stand it! She
wouldn't stay there and play second fiddle to another woman--she, a
bride! Fresh tears came with that last. Her mother and father would
never have treated her that way. They didn't think Deane Franklin good
enough for her, anyway! She would go back home! _That_ would make things
pretty hard for him! That would show what this woman had done! And he'd
be sorry then--would want her back--and she wouldn't come. She finally
found control in that thought of her power over him used to make him
suffer.

Deane, meanwhile, was hurrying through the streets that had the
unrealness of that hour just before morning. That aspect of things was
with him associated with death; almost always when he had been on the
streets at that hour it was because someone was fighting death. It was
so still--as if things were awed. And a light that seemed apart from
natural things was formed by the way the street lights grew pale in the
faint light of coming day. Everyone was sleeping--all save those in a
house half a dozen blocks away, the house where they were waiting for
death.

He was on foot, having left his car down at the garage for some repairs
after taking his mother home. As he slowed for a moment from a walk that
was half run he thought of how useless his hurrying was. What in the
world could he do when he got there? Nothing save assure them he could
do nothing. Poor Ruth!--it seemed she had so much, so many hard things.
This was a time when one needed one's friends, but of course they
couldn't come near her--on account of society. Though--his face softened
with the thought--Annie Morris would come, she not being oppressed by
this duty to society. He thought of the earnestness of her thin face as
she talked of Ruth. That let in the picture of Amy's face as he
introduced them. He tried not to keep seeing it. He did think, however,
that it was pretty unnecessary of Amy to have talked to his mother about
Ruth. All that was unyielding in him had been summoned by the way his
mother talked to him going home--"going for him" like that because he
had wanted Amy to go and see Ruth. That, it seemed to him, was something
between him and Amy. He would not have supposed she would be so ready to
talk with some one else about a thing that was just between themselves.
There had been that same old hardening against his mother when she began
talking of Ruth, and that feeling that shut her out excluded Amy with
her. And he had wanted Amy with him.

Hurrying on, he tried not to think of it. He didn't know why Amy had
talked to his mother about it--perhaps it just happened so, perhaps his
mother began it. He seized upon that. And Amy didn't understand; she was
young--her life had never touched anything like this. He was going to
talk to her--really talk to her, not fly off the handle at the first
thing she would say. He told himself that he had been stupid, hard--a
bungler. It made him feel better to tell himself that. Yes, he certainly
had been unsympathetic, and it was a shame that anything had come to
make Amy unhappy--and right there at first, too! Why, it was actually
making her sick! When he went back after taking his mother home Amy said
she had a bad headache and didn't want to talk. She was so queer that he
had taken her at her word and had not tried to talk to her--be nice to
her. It seemed now that he hadn't been kind; it helped him to feel that
he hadn't been kind. And it was the headache, being roused in the night
when she was not well that had made her so--well, so wrought up about
his answering to the call of the Hollands--old patients, old friends. He
was going to be different; he was going to be more tender with Amy--that
would be the way to make her understand. Such were the things his
troubled mind and hurt heart tried to be persuaded of as, thinking at
the same time of other things--the death to which he was hurrying, how
hard it would be for Ruth if Cyrus didn't speak to her--he passed
swiftly by the last houses where people slept and turned from a world
tinged with the strangeness of an hour so little known to men's
consciousness, softly opened the door and stepped into the house where
death was touching life with that same unreality with which, without,
day touched night.

Miss Copeland, wrapped in a bathrobe, sat in the upstairs hall. "He's
still breathing," she whispered in that voice which is for death alone.
In the room Ruth and Ted stood close together, the nurse on the other
side of the bed. Ruth's hair was braided down her back; he remembered
when she used to wear it that way, he had one of those sudden pictures
of her--on her way to school, skipping along with Edith Lawrence. She
turned, hearing him, and there was that rush of feeling to her eyes that
always claimed him for Ruth, that quick, silent assumption of his
understanding that always let down bars between them. But Ruth kept
close to Ted, as if she would shield him; the boy looked as Deane had
seen novices look in the operating room.

There was nothing for him to do beyond look at his patient and nod to
the nurse in confirmation that it would be any minute now. He walked
around to Ted and Ruth, taking an arm of each of them and walking with
them to the far side of the room.

"There's nothing to do but wait," he said.

"I wish Harriett and Cyrus would get here," whispered Ruth.

"You telephoned?"

"Before I did you--but of course it's a little farther."

They stood there together in that strange silence, hearing only the
unlifelike breathing of the man passing from life. Listening to it,
Ruth's hand on Deane's arm tightened. Soothingly he patted her hand.

Then, at a movement from the nurse, he stepped quickly to the bed. Ruth
and Ted, close together, first followed, then held back. A minute later
he turned to them. "It's over," he said, in the simple way final things
are said.

There was a choking little cry from Ted. Ruth murmured something, her
face all compassion for him. But after a moment she left her brother and
stood alone beside her father. In that moment of seeing her face, before
turning away because it seemed he should turn away, Deane got one of the
strangest impressions of his life. It was as if she was following her
father--reaching him; as if there was a fullness of feeling, a rising
passionate intensity that could fairly overflow from life. Then she
turned back to Ted.

Cyrus and Harriett had entered. There was a moment when the four
children were there together. Cyrus did not come up to the bed until
Ruth had left. Deane watched his face as--perfunctorily subdued,
decorous, he stood where Ruth had stood a moment before. Then Cyrus
turned to him and together they walked from the room, Cyrus asking why
they had not been telephoned in time.

Deane lingered for a little while, hating to go without again seeing
Ruth and Ted. He tapped at Ruth's door; he was not answered, but the
unlatched door had swung a little open at his touch. He saw that the
brother and sister were out on the little porch opening off Ruth's room.
He went out and stood beside them, knowing that he would be wanted. The
sun was just rising, touching the dew on the grass. The birds were
singing for joy in another day. The three who had just seen death stood
there together in silence.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The two days when the natural course of life was arrested by death had
passed. Their father had been buried that afternoon, and in the early
evening Ted and Ruth were sitting on the little upper porch, very quiet
in the new poignant emptiness of the house. Many people had been coming
and going in those last few days; now that was over and there was a
pause before the routine of life was to be resumed. The fact that the
nurse had gone seemed to turn the page.

Ruth had just asked how long Cyrus was going to stay and Ted replied
that he wanted to stay on a week or perhaps more, attending to some
business. She knew how crowded it must be for them at Harriett's, knew
that if she went away Cyrus would come home. There seemed nothing more
to keep her; she would like to be with Ted awhile, but it seemed she
could not do that without continuing a hard condition for them all. They
could settle into a more natural order of things with her not there. It
was time for her to go.

It was hard to have to think that. She would love to have stayed a
little while. She had been away so long--wanting home for so long. She
knew now, facing the going away, how much she had secretly hoped might
result from this trip back home.

She had seen a number of people in the past few days--relatives, old
friends of the family, friends of Ted. She had done better in meeting
them than, just a little while before, she would have thought possible.
Something remained with her from that hour at her mother's grave, that
strange hour when she had seemed to see life from outside, beyond it.
That had summoned something within herself that no personal hurt could
scatter, as if taking her in to something from which no circumstance
could drive her out. She had felt an inner quiet, a steadiness within;
there was power in it, and consolation. It took her out of that feeling
of having no place--no right to a place, the feeling that had made her
wretched and powerless. She was of life; her sure inner sense of the
reality and beauty of that seemed a thing not to be broken down from
without. It was hers, her own. It sustained her; it gave her poise. The
embarrassment of other people gave way before her simple steadiness. She
had had but the one point of contact with them--that of her father's
death; it made her want more, made going away hard. It was hard to leave
all the old things after even this slight touch with them again.

And that new quiet, that new force within was beginning to make for new
thinking. She had thought much about what she had lived through--she
could not help doing that, but she was thinking now with new
questionings. She had not questioned much; she had accepted. What was
gathering within her now was a feeling that a thing so real, so of life
as her love had been should not be a thing to set her apart, should not
be a thing to blight the lives that touched hers. This was not something
called up in vindication, a mere escape from hard thinking, her own way
out from things she could not bear; it was deeper than that, far less
facile. It came from that inner quiet--from that strange new
assurance--this feeling that her love should not have devastated, that
it was too purely of life for that; that it was a thing to build up
life, to give to it; this wondering, at once timid and bold, if there
was not something wrong with an order that could give it no place, that
made it life's enemy.

She had been afraid of rebellious thinking, of questionings. There had
been so much to fight, so much to make her afraid. At first all the
strength of her feeling had gone into the fight for Stuart's health; she
was afraid of things that made her rebellious--needing all of herself,
not daring to break through. The circumstances had seemed to make her
own life just shut down around her; and even after those first years,
living itself was so hard, there were so many worries and
disappointments--her feeling about it was so tense, life so stern--that
her thoughts did not shoot a long way out into questionings. She had
done a thing that cut her off from her family; she had hurt other people
and because of that she herself must suffer. Life could not be for her
what it was for others. She accepted much that she did not try to
understand. For one thing, she had had no one to talk to about those
things. Seeing how Stuart's resentment against the state of things
weakened him, keeping him from his full powers to meet those hard
conditions, she did not encourage their talking of it and had tried to
keep herself from the thinking that with him went into brooding and was
weakening. She had to do the best she could about things; she could not
spend herself in rebellion against what she had to meet. Like a man who
finds himself on a dizzy ledge she grew fearful of much looking around.

But now, in these last few days, swept back into the wreckage she had
left, something fluttered to life and beat hard within her spirit,
breaking its way through the fearfulness that shut her in and sending
itself out in new bolder flights. Not that those outgoings took her away
from the place she had devastated; it was out of the poignancy of her
feeling about the harm she had done, out of her new grief in it that
these new questionings were born. The very fact that she did see so
well, and so sorrowingly, what she had done, brought this new feeling
that it should not have been that way, that what she had felt, and her
fidelity to that feeling--ruthless fidelity though it was--should not
have blighted like this. There was something that seemed at the heart of
it all in that feeling of not being ashamed in the presence of
death--she who had not denied life.

Silence had fallen between her and Ted, she saddened in the thought of
going away and open to the puzzling things that touched her life at
every point; looking at Ted--proud of him--hating to leave him now just
when she had found him again, thinking with loving gratefulness and
pride of how generous and how understanding he had been with her, how he
was at once so boyish and so much more than his years. The fine
seriousness of his face tonight made him very dear and very comforting
to her. She wanted to keep close to him; she could not bear the thought
of again losing him. If her hard visit back home yielded just that she
would have had rich gain from it. She began talking with him about what
he would do. He talked freely of his work, as if glad to talk of it; he
was not satisfied with it, did not think there was much "chance" there
for him. Ted had thought he wanted to study law, but his father, in one
of his periods of depression, had said he could not finish sending him
through college and Ted had gone into one of the big manufactories
there. He was in the sales department, and he talked to Ruth of the
work. He told her of his friends, of what they were doing; they talked
of many things, speaking of the future with that gentle intimacy there
can be between those sorrowing together for things past. Their sensitive
consciousness of the emptiness of the house--the old place, their
home,--brought them together through a deep undercurrent of feeling.
Their voices were low as they spoke of more intimate things than it is
usual to speak of without constraint, something lowered between them as
only a grief shared can lower bars to the spirit, their thinking set in
that poignant sense of life which death alone seems able to create.

Ted broke a pause to say that he supposed it was getting late and he
must be starting for Harriett's. Cyrus had asked him to come over awhile
that evening. Mr. McFarland, their family lawyer, was going out of town
for a few days, leaving the next morning. He was coming in that evening,
more as the old friend than formally, to speak to them about some
business matters, Cyrus's time being limited and there being a number of
things to arrange.

"I hate leaving you alone, Ruth," said Ted, lingering.

She looked over to him with quick affectionate smile. "I don't mind,
Ted. Somehow I don't mind being alone tonight."

That was true. Being alone would not be loneliness that evening. Things
were somehow opened; all things had so strangely opened. She had been
looking down the deep-shadowed street, that old street down which she
used to go. The girl who used to go down that street was singularly real
to her just then; she had about her the fresh feeling, the vivid sense,
of a thing near in time. Old things were so strangely opened, old
feeling was alive again: the wild joy in the girl's heart, the delirious
expectancy--and the fear. It was strange how completely one could get
back across the years, how things gone could become living things again.
That was why she was not going to mind being alone just then; she had a
sense of the whole flow of her life--living, moving. It did not seem a
thing to turn away from; it was not often that things were all open like
that.

"I shouldn't wonder if Deane would drop in," said Ted, as if trying to
help himself through leaving her there alone.

"He may," Ruth answered. She did not say it with enthusiasm, much as she
would like to talk with Deane. Deane was just the one it would be good
to talk with that night. But Deane never mentioned his wife to her. At
first, in her preoccupation, and her pleasure in seeing him, she had not
thought much about that. Then it had come to her that doubtless Deane's
wife would not share his feeling about her, that she would share the
feeling of all the other people; that brought the fear that she might,
again, be making things hard for Deane. She had done enough of that;
much as his loyalty, the rare quality of his affectionate friendship
meant to her, she would rather he did not come than let the slightest
new shadow fall upon his life because of her. And yet it seemed all
wrong, preposterous, to think anyone who was close to Deane, anyone whom
he loved, should not understand this friendship between them. She
thought of how, meeting after all those years, they were not strange
with each other. That seemed rare--to be cherished.

"What's Deane's wife like, Ted?" she asked.

"I haven't met her," he replied, "but I've seen her. She's awfully
good-looking; lots of style, and carries herself as if--oh, as if she
knew she was somebody," he laughed. "And I guess Deane thinks she _is_,"
he added with another laugh. "Guess he decided that first time he met
her. You know he stopped in Indianapolis to see a classmate who was
practising there--met her at a party, I believe, and--good-by Deane! But
somehow she isn't what you'd expect Deane's wife to be," he went on more
seriously. "Doesn't look that way, anyhow. Looks pretty frigid, I
thought, and, oh--fixed up. As if she wasn't just real."

Ruth's brows puckered. If there was one thing it seemed the wife of
Deane Franklin should be, it was real. But doubtless Ted was wrong--not
knowing her. It did not seem that Deane would be drawn to anyone who was
not real.

She lingered in the thought of him. Real was just what Deane was. He had
been wonderfully real with her in those days--days that had made the
pattern of her life. Reality had swept away all other things between
them. That carried her back to the new thinking, the questions. It
seemed it was the things not real that were holding people apart. It was
the artificialities people had let living build up around them made
those people hard. People would be simpler--kinder--could those unreal
things be swept away. She dwelt on the thought of a world like that--a
world of people simple and real as Deane Franklin was simple and real.

She was called from that by a movement and exclamation from Ted, who had
leaned over the railing. "There goes Mildred Woodbury," he said,--"and
alone."

His tone made her look at him in inquiry and then down the street at the
slight figure of a girl whose light dress stood out clearly between the
shadows. Mildred was the daughter of a family who lived in the next
block. The Woodburys and the Hollands had been neighbors and friends as
far back as Ruth could remember. Mildred was only a little girl when
Ruth went away--such a pretty little girl, her fair hair always gayly
tied with ribbons. She had been there with her mother the night before
and Ruth had been startled by her coming into the room where she was and
saying impulsively: "You don't remember me, do you? I'm Mildred--Mildred
Woodbury."

"And you used to call me Wuth!" Ruth had eagerly replied.

It had touched her, surrounded as she was by perfunctoriness and
embarrassment that this young girl should seek her out in that warm way.
And something in the girl's eyes had puzzled her. She had returned to
thought of it more than once and that made her peculiarly interested in
Ted's queer allusion to Mildred now.

"Well?" she inquired.

"Mildred's getting in rather bad," he said shortly.

"Getting--what do you mean, Ted?" she asked, looking at him in a
startled way.

"People are talking about her," he said.

"People are--?" she began, but stopped, looking at him all the while in
that startled way.

"Talking about her," he repeated. "I guess it's been going on for some
time--though I didn't hear about it until a little while ago."

"About what, Ted?" Her voice faltered and it seemed to make him suddenly
conscious of what he was saying, to whom he spoke.

"Why,"--he faltered now too, "Mildred's acting sort of silly--that's
all. I don't know--a flirtation, or something, with Billy Archer. You
don't know him; he came here a few years ago on some construction work.
He's an engineer. He is a fascinating fellow, all right," he added.

Ruth pushed back her chair into deeper shadow. "And--?" she suggested
faintly.

"He's married," briefly replied Ted.

She did not speak for what seemed a long time. Ted was beginning to
fidget. Then, "How old is Mildred, Ted?" Ruth asked in a very quiet
voice.

"About twenty, I guess; she's a couple of years younger than I am."

"And this man?--how old is he?" That she asked a little sharply.

"Oh, I don't know; he's in the older crowd; somewhere in the thirties, I
should say."

"Well--" But she abruptly checked what she had sharply begun to say, and
pushed her chair still further back into shadow. When Ted stole a timid
glance at her a minute later he saw that she seemed to be holding her
hands tight together.

"And doesn't Mildred's mother--?" It seemed impossible for her to finish
anything, to say it out.

He shook his head. "Guess not. It's funny--but you know a person's
folks--"

There was another silence; then Ted began to whistle softly and was
looking over the railing as if interested in something down on the lawn.

"And you say people are really--talking about Mildred, Ted?" Ruth
finally asked, speaking with apparent effort.

He nodded. "Some people are snubbing her. You know this town is long on
that," he threw in with a short laugh. "I saw Mrs. Brewer--remember
her?--she used to be Dorothy Hanlay--out and out snub Mildred at a party
the other night. She came up to her after she'd been dancing with
Billy--Lord knows how many times she'd danced with him that night--and
Mrs. Brewer simply cut her. I saw it myself. Mildred got white for a
moment, then smiled in a funny little way and turned away. Tough on her,
wasn't it?--for really, she's a good deal of a kid, you know. And say,
Ruth, there's something mighty decent about Edith--about Mrs. Blair. She
saw it and right afterwards she went up to Mildred, seemed particularly
interested in her, and drew her into her crowd. Pretty white, don't you
think? That old hen--Mrs. Brewer--got red, let me tell you, for Edith
can put it all over her, you know, on being somebody, and that _got_
her--good and plenty!"

There was a queer little sound from Ruth, a sound like a not quite
suppressed sob; Ted rose, as if for leaving, and stood there awkwardly,
his back to her. He felt that Ruth was crying, or at least trying not to
cry. Why had he talked of a thing like that? Why did he have to bring in
Edith Lawrence?

It seemed better to go on talking about it now, as naturally as he
could. "I never thought there was much to Mildred," he resumed, not
turning round. "She always seemed sort of stuck up with the fellows of
our crowd. But I guess you never can tell. I saw her look at Billy
Archer the other night." He paused with a little laugh. "There wasn't
anything very stuck up about that look."

As still Ruth did not speak he began to talk about the property across
the street being for sale. When he turned around for taking leave--it
being past the time for going to Harriett's--it made him furious at
himself to see how strained and miserable Ruth's face was. She scarcely
said good-by to him; she was staring down the street where Mildred had
disappeared a few moments before. All the way over to Harriett's he
wondered just what Ruth was thinking. He was curious as well as
self-reproachful.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

When Ted entered the living-room at his sister Harriett's he felt as if
something damp and heavy had been thrown around him. He got the feeling
of being expected to contribute to the oppressiveness of the occasion.
The way no one was sitting in a comfortable position seemed to suggest
that constraint was deemed fitting. Cyrus was talking to Mr. McFarland
with a certain self-conscious decorousness. Harriett's husband, the Rev.
Edgar Tyler, sat before the library table in more of his pulpit manner
than was usual with him in his household, as if--so it seemed to
Ted--the relation of death to the matter in hand brought it particularly
within his province. Ted had never liked him; especially he had hated
his attitude about Ruth--his avowed sorrowfulness with which the heart
had nothing to do. He resented the way his brother-in-law had made
Harriett feel that she owed it to the community, to the church, not to
countenance her sister. Harriett had grown into that manner of striving
to do the right thing. She had it now--sitting a little apart from the
others, as if not to intrude herself. Sitting there with those others
his heart went out to Ruth; he was _for_ her, he told himself warmly,
and he'd take nothing off of Cy about her, either! He watched Cyrus and
thought of how strange it was that a brother and sister should be as
different as he and Ruth were. They had always been different; as far
back as he could remember they were different about everything. Ruth was
always keyed up about something--delighted, and Cy was always "putting a
crimp" in things. As a little boy, when he told Ruth things he was
pleased about they always grew more delightful for telling her; and
somehow when you told Cyrus about a jolly thing it always flattened out
a little in the telling.

A shrinking from the appearance of too great haste gave a personal color
to the conversation. It was as old friend quite as much as family
solicitor that the lawyer talked to them, although the occasion for
getting together that night was that Cyrus might learn of an investment
of his father's which demanded immediate attention.

Mr. McFarland spoke of that, and then of how little else remained. He
hesitated, then ventured: "You know, I presume, that your father has not
left you now what he would have had ten years ago?"

Ted saw Cyrus's lips tighten, his eyes lower. He glanced at Harriett,
who looked resigned; though he was not thinking much of them, but of his
father, who had met difficulties, borne disappointments. He was thinking
of nights when his father came home tired; mornings when he went away in
that hurried, harassed way. He could see him sitting in his chair
brooding. The picture of him now made him appear more lonely than he had
thought of him while living. And now his father was dead and they were
sitting there talking over his affairs, looking into things that their
father had borne alone, things he had done the best he could about. He
wished he had tried harder to be company for him. In too many of those
pictures which came now his father was alone.

He heard Cyrus speaking. "Yes," he was saying, "father was broken by our
personal troubles." There was a pause. Ted did not raise his eyes to his
brother. He did not want to look at him, not liking his voice as he said
that. "It is just another way," Cyrus went on, "in which we all have to
suffer for our family disgrace."

Ted felt himself flushing. Why need Cy have said that! Mr. McFarland had
turned slightly away, as if not caring to hear it.

And then Cyrus asked about their father's will.

The attorney's reply was quiet. "He leaves no will."

Ted looked at him in surprise. Then he looked at Cyrus and saw his
startled, keen, queer look at the attorney. It was after seeing his
brother's face that he realized what this meant--that if his father left
no will Ruth shared with the rest of them. Suddenly his heart was
beating fast.

"How's that?" Cyrus asked sharply.

"There was a will, but he destroyed it about two month's ago."

"He--? Why!" Cyrus pressed in that sharp voice.

Ted felt certain that the lawyer liked saying what he had to say then.
He said it quietly, but looking right at Cyrus. "He destroyed his will
because it cut off his daughter Ruth."

Ted got up and walked to the window, stood there staring out at the
street lights. Bless dad! He wished he could see him; he would give
almost anything to see him for just a minute. He wished he had known; he
would love to have told his father just how corking he thought that was.
He stood there a minute not wanting to show the others how much he was
feeling--this new, warm rush of love for his father, and his deep
gladness for Ruth. He thought of what it would mean to her, what it
would mean to know her father had felt like that. He had had to leave
her there at home alone; now he could go home and tell her this news
that would mean so much.

When he turned back to the group it was to see that he was not alone in
being moved by what they had heard. Harriett too had turned a little
away from the others and was looking down. He saw a tear on her
face--and liked her better than he ever had before. Then he looked at
her husband and in spite of all he was feeling it was hard not to smile;
his brother-in-law's face looked so comical to him, trying to twist
itself into the fitting emotions. Ted watched him unsparingly for a
minute, maliciously saying to himself: "Keep on, old boy, you'll make it
after a little!"

Then he looked at his brother and his face hardened, seeing too well
what new feeling this roused in Cyrus against Ruth, reading the
resentment toward their father for this final weakening in his stand
against her.

"Well--" Cyrus began but did not go on, his lips tightening.

"Your father said," the lawyer added, "that if there was one of his
children--more than the others--needed what he could do for her, it was
his daughter Ruth."

He was looking at Ted, and Ted nodded eagerly, thinking now of what, in
the practical sense, this would mean to Ruth. Mr. McFarland turned back
to Cyrus as he remarked: "He spoke of Ruth with much feeling."

Cyrus flushed. "I guess father was pretty much broken--in mind as well
as body--at that time," he said unpleasantly.

"His mind was all right," answered the lawyer curtly.

He left a few minutes later; Harriett, who went with him to the door,
did not return to the room. The two men and Ted sat for a moment in
silence. Then Cyrus turned upon him as if angered by what he divined him
to be feeling. "Well," he said roughly, "I suppose you're pleased?"

"I'm pleased, all right," replied Ted with satisfaction. He looked at
the minister. "Good thing, for I guess I'm the only fellow here who is."

Harriett's husband colored slightly. "I am neither pleased nor
displeased," was his grave reply. "Surely it was for your father to do
as he wished. For a father to forgive a child is--moving. I only hope,"
he added, "that it will not seem in the community to mean the
countenancing--" He paused, looking to Cyrus for approval.

Then Ten blazed out. "Well, if you want to know what I think, I don't
think a little 'countenancing' of Ruth is going to do this community--or
anybody else--any harm!"

Cyrus looked at him with that slightly sneering smile that always
enraged Ted. "You're proud of your sister, I suppose?" he inquired
politely.

Ted reddened. Then he grew strangely quiet. "Yes," he said, "I believe I
am. I've come pretty close to Ruth these last few days, and I think
that's just what I am--proud of her. I can't say I'm proud of what Ruth
did; I'd have to think more about that. But I'm proud of what she _is_.
And I don't know--I don't know but what it's what a person _is_ that
counts." He fell silent, thinking of what he meant by that, of the
things he felt in Ruth.

Cyrus laughed mockingly. "Rather a curious thing to be proud of, I
should say. What she 'is' is--"

Ted jumped up. "Don't say it, Cy! Whatever it is you're going to
say--just don't say it!"

Cyrus had risen and was putting in his pocket a paper Mr. McFarland had
given him. "No?" he said smoothly, as if quite unperturbed. "And why
not?"

At that uncaring manner something seemed to break inside Ted's head, as
if all the things Cyrus had said about Ruth had suddenly gathered there
and pressed too hard. His arm shot out at his brother.

"That's why not!" he cried.

He had knocked Cyrus back against the wall and stood there threatening
him. To the minister, who had stepped up, protesting, he snapped: "None
of _your_ put-in! And after this, just be a little more careful in
_your_ talk--see?"

He stepped back from Cyrus but stood there glaring, breathing hard with
anger. Cyrus, whose face had gone white, but who was calm, went back to
the table and resumed what he had been doing there.

"A creditable performance, I must say, for the day of your father's
funeral," he remarked after a moment.

"That's all right!" retorted Ted. "Don't think I'm sorry! I don't know
any better way to start out new--start out alone--than to tell you what
I think of you!--let you know that I'll not take a thing off of you
about Ruth. You've done enough, Cy. Now you quit. You kept mother and
father away when they didn't want to be kept away--and I want to tell
you that I'm _on_ to you, anyway. Don't think for a minute that I
believe it's your great virtue that's hurting you. You can't put that
over on me. It's pride and stubbornness and just plain meanness makes
you the way you are! Yes, I'm glad to have a chance to tell you what I
think of you--and then I'm through with you, Cy. I think you're a
pin-head! Why, you haven't got the heart of a flea! I don't know how
anybody as fine as Ruth ever came to have a brother like you!"

His feeling had grown as he spoke, and he stopped now because he was too
close to losing control; he reddened as his brother--calm, apparently
unmoved--surveyed him as if mildly amused. That way Cyrus looked at him
when they were quarrelling always enraged him. If he would only _say_
something--not stand there as if he were too superior to bother himself
with such a thing! He knew Cyrus knew it maddened him--that that was why
he did it, and so it was quietly that he resumed: "No, Cy, I'm not with
you, and you might as well know it. I'm for Ruth. You've got the world
on your side--and I know the arguments you can put up, and all that, but
Ruth's got a--" he fumbled a minute for the words--"Ruth's got a power
and an understanding about her that you'll never have. She's got a
heart. More than that, she's got--character."

He paused, thinking, and Cyrus did speak then. "Oh, I don't think I'd
use that word," he said suavely.

"No, you wouldn't; you wouldn't see it, but that's just what I mean." He
turned to the minister. "Character, I say, is what my sister Ruth has
got. Character is something more than putting up a slick front. It's
something more than doing what's expected of you. It's a kind of--a kind
of being faithful to yourself. _Being_ yourself. Oh, I know--" at a
sound from his brother--"just how you can laugh at it, but there's
something to it just the same. Why, Ruth's got more real stuff in her
than you two put together! After being with her these days you, Cy,
strike a fellow as pretty shallow."

That brought the color to his brother's face. Stung to a real retort, he
broke out with considerable heat: "If to have a respect for decency is
'shallow'--!" He quickly checked himself as the door opened and
Harriett's maid entered.

She paused, feeling the tension, startled by their faces. "Excuse me,
sir," she said to the minister, "but Mrs. Tyler said I was to tell you
she had gone out for a few minutes. She said to tell you she had gone to
see her sister."

She looked startled at Ted's laugh. After she had gone he laughed again.
"Hard luck!" he said to his brother-in-law, and walked from the room.

He did not go directly home. He was too upset to face Ruth just then; he
did not want her to know, it would trouble her. And he wanted to
walk--walk as fast as he could, walk off steam, he called it. His heart
was pounding and there seemed too much blood in his head. But he wasn't
sorry, he told himself. Cy would have it in for him now, but what did he
care for that? He could get along without him. But his lips trembled as
he thought that. He had had to get along without his mother; from now on
he would have to get along without his father. He had a moment of
feeling very much alone. And then he thought of Ruth. Yes,--there was
Ruth! He wheeled toward home. He wanted to tell her. He hoped Harriett
hadn't got it told; he wanted to tell her himself. Bless dad! He loved
him for doing that. If only he'd known it in time to let him know what
he thought of him for doing it!

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Harriett had been with Ruth for half an hour and still she had not told
her what she had come to tell her. She was meaning to tell it before she
left, to begin it any minute now, but, much as she wanted to tell it,
she shrank from doing so. It seemed that telling that would open
everything up--and they had opened nothing up. Harriett had grown into a
way of shrinking back from the things she really wanted to do, was
unpracticed in doing what she felt like doing.

Acting upon an impulse, she had started for Ruth. There had been a
moment of real defiance when she told Mamie to tell Mr. Tyler that she
had gone to see her sister. She had a right to go and see her sister! No
one should keep her from it. Her heart was stirred by what her father
had done about Ruth. It made her know that she too felt more than she
had shown. His having done that made her want to do something. It moved
her to have this manifestation of a softening she had not suspected. It
reached something in her, something that made her feel a little more
free, more bold, more loving. His defiance, for she felt that in it too,
struck a spark in her. She even had a secret satisfaction in the
discomfiture she knew this revelation of her father's--what they would
call weakening--caused her husband and her brother. Unacknowledged
dissatisfactions of her own sharpened her feeling about it. She had not
looked at either her husband or Cyrus when the announcement was made,
but beneath her own emotion was a secret, unacknowledged gloating at
what she knew was their displeasure, at their helplessness to resent.
Ted was a dear boy! Ted's shining eyes somehow made her know just how
glad she herself was.

So she had hurried along, stirred, eager to tell Ruth. But once with her
she held back from telling her, grew absurdly timid about it. It seemed
so much else might come when that came--things long held back, things
hard to let one's self talk about.

And then Ruth was so strange tonight. After that first day it had been
easy to talk with Ruth; that first embarrassment over, she had seemed
simple and natural and Harriett could talk with her about the little
things that came up and at times just forget the big thing that held
them apart. After that first meeting she had felt much more comfortable
with Ruth than she would have supposed the terrible circumstances would
let her feel. But tonight Ruth was different, constrained, timid; she
seemed holding herself back, as if afraid of something. It made Harriett
conscious of what there was holding them apart. She did not know how to
begin what she had been so eager to tell.

And so they talked of surface things--current things: the service that
afternoon; some of the relatives who had been there; of old friends of
their father's. They kept away from the things their hearts were full
of.

Ruth had been glad to see Harriett; it touched her that Harriett should
come. But she was nervous with her; it was true that she was holding
back. That new assurance which had helped her through the last few days
had deserted her. Since Ted told her of Mildred that inner quiet from
which assurance drew was dispelled. She seemed struck back--bewildered,
baffled. Was it always to be that way? Every time she gained new ground
for her feet was she simply to be struck back to new dismays, new
incertitudes, new pain? Had she only deluded herself in that feeling
which had created the strengthening calm of the last few days?

After Ted left her she had continued to sit looking down the street
where Mildred had gone; just a little while before she had been looking
down that street as the way she herself had gone--the young girl giving
herself to love, facing all perils, daring all things for the love in
her heart. But now she was not thinking of the love in Mildred's heart;
she was thinking of the perils around her--the pity of it--the waiting
disaster. A little while before it had seemed there should always be a
place in the world for love, that things shutting love out were things
unreal. And now she longed to be one with Edith in getting Mildred back
to those very things--those unreal things that would safeguard. The
mockery of it beat her back, robbing her of the assurance that had been
her new strength. That was why Harriett found her strange, hard to talk
to. She wanted to cower back. She tried not to think of Mildred--to get
back to herself. But that she could not do; Mildred was there in
between--confusing, a mockery.

Harriett spoke of the house, how she supposed the best thing to do would
be to offer it for sale. Ruth looked startled and pained. "It's in bad
repair," Harriett said; "it's all run down. And then--there's really no
reason for keeping it."

And then they fell silent, thinking of years gone--years when the house
had not been all run down, when there was good reason for keeping it. To
let the house go to strangers seemed the final acknowledgment that all
those old things had passed away. It was a more intimate, a sympathetic
silence into which that feeling flowed--each thinking of old days in
that house, each knowing that the other was thinking of those days.
Harriett could see Ruth as a little girl running through those rooms.
She remembered a certain little blue gingham dress--and Ruth's hair
braided down her back; pictures of Ruth with their grandfather, their
mother, their father--all those three gone now. She started to tell Ruth
what she had come to tell her, then changed it to something else, still
holding back, afraid of emotion, of breaking through, seeming powerless
and hating herself for being powerless. She would tell that a little
later--before she left. She would wait until Ted came in. She seized
upon that, it let her out--let her out from the thing she had been all
warm eagerness to do. To bridge that time she asked a few diffident
questions about the West; she really wanted very much to know how Ruth
lived, how she "managed." But she put the questions carefully, it would
seem reluctantly, just because almost everything seemed to lead to that
one thing,--the big thing that lay there between her and Ruth. It was
hard to ask questions about the house Ruth lived in and not let her mind
get swamped by that one terrible fact that she lived there with Stuart
Williams--another woman's husband.

Harriett's manner made Ruth bitter. It seemed Harriett was afraid to
talk to her, evidently afraid that at any moment she would come upon
something she did not want to come near. Harriett needn't be so
afraid!--she wasn't going to contaminate her.

And so the talk became a pretty miserable affair. It was a relief when
Flora Copeland came in the room. "There's someone here to see you,
Ruth," she said.

"Deane?" inquired Ruth.

"No, a woman."

"A woman?"--and then, at the note of astonishment in her own voice she
laughed in an embarrassed little way.

"Yes, a Mrs. Herman. She says you may remember her as Annie Morris. She
says she went to school with you."

"Yes," said Ruth, "I know." She was looking down, pulling at her
handkerchief. After an instant she looked up and said quietly: "Won't
you ask her to come in here?"

The woman who stood in the doorway a moment later gave the impression of
life, work, having squeezed her too hard. She had quick movements, as if
she were used to doing things in a hurry. She had on a cheap, plain
suit, evidently bought several years before. She was very thin, her face
almost pinched, but two very live eyes looked out from it. She appeared
embarrassed, but somehow the embarrassment seemed only a surface thing.
She held out a red, rough hand to Ruth and smiled in a quick, bright way
as she said: "I don't know that you remember me, Ruth."

"Oh, yes I do, Annie," Ruth replied, and held on to the red, rough hand.

"I didn't know; I'm sure," she laughed, "that you've always meant more
to me than I could to you."

After Ruth had introduced Harriett the stranger explained that with: "I
thought a great deal of Ruth when we were in school together. She never
knew it--she had so many friends." A little pause followed that.

"So I couldn't bear to go away," Annie went on in her rather sharp,
bright way, "without seeing you, Ruth. I hope I'm not intruding, coming
so--soon."

"You are not intruding, Annie," said Ruth; her voice shook just a
little.

Ted had come home, and came in the room then and was introduced to
Annie, with whom, though frankly surprised at seeing her, he shook hands
warmly. "But we do know each other," he said.

"Oh, yes," she laughed, "I've brought you many a cauliflower."

"And oh, those eggs!" he laughed back.

Again there was a slight pause, and then Annie turned to Ruth with the
manner of being bound to get right into the thing she had come to say.
"I didn't wait longer, Ruth, because I was afraid you might get away and
I wondered,"--this she said diffidently, as one perhaps expecting too
much--"if there was any chance of your coming out to make me a little
visit before you go back.

"You know,"--she turned hastily to Ted, turning away from the things
gathering in Ruth's eyes, "the country is so lovely now. I thought it
might do Ruth good. She must be tired, after the long journey--and all.
I thought a good rest--" She turned back to Ruth. "Don't you think,
Ruth," she coaxed, "that you'd like to come out and play with my baby?"

And then no one knew what to do for suddenly Ruth was shaken with sobs.
Ted was soothing her, telling Annie that naturally she was nervous that
night. "Ted," she choked, in a queer, wild way, laughing through the
sobs, "did you _hear_? She wants me to come out and play with her
_baby_!"

Harriett got up and walked to the other side of the room.
Ruth--laughing, crying--was repeating: "She wants me to play with her
_baby_!" Harriett thought of her own children at home, whom Ruth had not
seen. She listened to the plans Annie and Ted and Ruth were making and
wretchedly wished she had done differently years before.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Ruth had been with Annie for five days now; the original three days for
which she had said she could come had been lengthened to a week, and she
knew that she would not want to go even then. For here was rest. Here
she could forget about herself as set apart from others. Here she did
not seem apart. After the stress of those days at home it was good to
rest in this simple feeling of being just one with others. It was good
to lie on the grass under the trees, troubled thoughts in abeyance, and
feel spring in the earth, take it in by smell and sound. It was
wonderfully good to play with the children, to lie on the grass and let
the little two year old girl--Annie's baby--pull at her hair, toddling
around her, cooing and crowing. There was healing in that. It was good
to be some place where she did not seem to cause embarrassment, to be
where she was wanted. After the strain of recent events the simple
things of these days were very sweet to her. It had become monstrous
always to have to feel that something about her made her different from
other people. There was something terrible in it--something not good for
one. Here was release from that.

And it was good to be with Annie; they had not talked much yet--not
seriously talked. Annie seemed to know that it was rest in little things
Ruth needed now, not talk of big ones. They talked about the chickens
and the cows, the flowers and the cauliflowers, about the children's
pranks. It was restoring to talk thus of inconsequential things; Ruth
was beginning to feel more herself than she had felt in years. On that
fifth day her step was lighter than when she came; it was easier to
laugh. Hers had once been so sunny a nature; it was amazingly easy to
break out of the moroseness with which circumstances had clouded her
into that native sunniness. That afternoon she sat on the knoll above
the house, leaning back against a tree and smiling lazily at the
gamboling of the new little pigs.

Annie was directing the boy who had been helping her cut asparagus to
carry the baskets up where Ruth was sitting. "I'm going to talk to you
while I make this into bunches, Ruth," she called.

"I'll help," Ruth called back with zest.

They talked at first of the idiosyncrasies of asparagus beds, of the
marketing of it; then something Annie said set Ruth thinking of
something that had happened when they were in high school. "Oh, do you
remember, Annie--" she laughingly began. There was that sort of talk for
awhile--"Do you remember...?" and "Oh, whatever became of...?"

As they worked on Ruth thought of the strangeness of her being there
with this girl who, when they were in school together, had meant so
little to her. Her own work lagged, watching Annie as with quick, sure
motions she made the asparagus into bunches for market. She did things
deftly and somehow gave the feeling of subordinating them to something
else, of not letting them take all of her. Ruth watched her with
affectionate interest; she wore an all-over gingham apron, her big sun
hat pushed back from her browned, thin face; she was not at all
attractive unless one saw the eager, living eyes--keenly intelligent
eyes. Ruth thought of her other friends--the girls who had been her
friends when she was in school and whom she had not seen now; she
wondered why it was Annie had none of the feeling that kept those other
girls away.

Annie's husband was a slow, stolid man; Ruth supposed that in his youth,
when Annie married him, he had perhaps been attractive in his
stalwartness. He was sluggish now; good humored enough, but apparently
as heavy in spirit as in body. Things outside the material round of
life--working, eating, sleeping--simply did not seem to exist for him.
At first she wondered how Annie could be content with life with him,
Annie, who herself was so keenly alive. Thinking of it now it seemed
Annie had the same adjustment to him that she had to the
asparagus,--something subordinated, not taking up very much of herself.
She had about Annie, and she did not know just why she had it, the
feeling that here was a person who could not be very greatly harmed,
could not be completely absorbed by routine, could not, for some reason
she could not have given, be utterly vanquished by any circumstance. She
went about her work as if that were one thing--and then there were other
things; as if she were in no danger of being swallowed up in her manner
of living. There was something apart that was dauntless. Ruth wondered
about her, she wanted to find out about her. She wanted for herself that
valiant spirit, a certain unconquerableness she felt in Annie.

Annie broke a pause to say: "You can't know, Ruth, how much it means to
have you here."

Ruth's face lighted and she smiled; she started to speak, but instead
only smiled again. She wanted to tell what it meant to her to be there,
but that seemed a thing not easily told.

"I wish you could stay longer," Annie went on, all the while working.
"So--" she paused, and continued a little diffidently--"so we could
really get acquainted; really talk. I hardly ever have anyone to talk
to," she said wistfully. "One gets pretty lonely sometimes. It would be
good to have someone to talk to about the things one thinks."

"What are the things you think, Annie?" Ruth asked impulsively.

"Oh, no mighty thoughts," laughed Annie; "but of course I'm always
thinking about things. We keep alive by thinking, don't we?"

Ruth gave her a startled look.

"Perhaps it's because I haven't had from life itself much of what I'd
like to have," Annie was going on, "that I've made a world within. Can't
let life cheat us, Ruth," she said brightly. "If we can't have things in
one way--have to get them in another."

Again Ruth looked at her in that startled way. Annie did not see it,
reaching over for more asparagus; she was all the time working along in
that quick, sure way--doing what she was doing cleverly and as if it
weren't very important. "Perhaps, Ruth," she said after a minute, "that
that's why my school-girl fancy for you persisted--deepened--the way it
has." She hesitated, then said simply: "I liked you for not letting life
cheat you."

She looked up with a quick little nod as she said that but found Ruth's
face very serious, troubled. "But I don't think I've done what you mean,
Annie," she began uncertainly. "I did what I did--because I had to. And
I'm afraid I haven't--gone on. It begins to seem to me now that I've
stayed in a pretty small place. I've been afraid!" she concluded with
sudden scorn.

"That isn't much wonder," Annie murmured gently.

"But with me," she took it up after a little, "I've had to go on." Her
voice went hard in saying it. "Things would have just shut right down on
me if I would have let them," she finished grimly.

"I married for passion," she began quietly after a minute. "Most people
do, I presume. At least most people who marry young."

Ruth colored. She was not used to saying things right out like that.

"Romantic love is a wonderful thing," Annie pursued; "I suppose it's the
most beautiful thing in the world--while it lasts." She laughed in a
queer, grim little way and gave a sharp twist to the knot she was tying.
"Sometimes it opens up to another sort of love--love of another
quality--and to companionship. It must be a beautiful thing--when it
does that." She hesitated a moment before she finished with a dryness
that had that grim quality: "With me--it didn't.

"So there came a time," she went on, and seemed newly to have gained
serenity, "when I saw that I had to give up--go under--or get through
myself what I wasn't going to get through anyone else. Oh, it's not the
beautiful way--not the complete way. But it's one way!" she flashed in
fighting voice. "I fought for something, Ruth. I held it. I don't know
that I've a name for it--but it's the most precious thing in life. My
life itself is pretty limited; aside from the children"--she softened in
speaking of them--"my life is--pretty barren. And as for the
children"--that fighting spirit broke sharply through, "they're all the
more reason for not sinking into things--not sinking into _them_," she
laughed.

As she stopped there Ruth asked eagerly, eyes intently upon her: "But
just what is it you mean, Annie? Just what is it you fought for--kept?"

"To be my _own_!" Annie flashed back at her, like steel.

Then she changed; for the first time her work fell unheeded in her lap;
the eyes which a minute before had flashed fight looked far off and were
dreamy; her face, over which the skin seemed to have become stretched,
burned by years of sun and wind, quivered a little. When she spoke again
it was firmly but with sadness. "It's what we think that counts, Ruth.
It's what we feel. It's what we _are_. Oh, I'd like richer living--more
beauty--more joy. Well, I haven't those things. For various reasons, I
won't have them. That makes it the more important to have all I can
take!"--it leaped out from the gentler thinking like a sent arrow.
"Nobody holds my thoughts. They travel as far as they themselves have
power to travel. They bring me whatever they can bring me--and I shut
nothing out. I'm not afraid!"

Ruth was looking at her with passionate earnestness.

"Over there in that town,"--Annie made a little gesture toward it, "are
hundreds of women who would say they have a great deal more than I have.
And it's true enough," she laughed, "that they have some things I'd like
to have. But do you think I'd trade with them? Oh, no! Not much! The
free don't trade with the bond, Ruth."

And still Ruth did not speak, but listened with that passionate
intentness.

"There in that town," Annie went on, "are people--most a whole townful
of them--who are going through life without being really awake to life
at all. They move around in a closed place, doing the same silly little
things--copy-cats--repeaters. They're not their _own_--they're not
awake. They're like things run by machinery. Like things going in their
sleep. Take those girls we used to go to school with. Why, take Edith
Lawrence. I see her sometimes. She always speaks sweetly to me; she
means to be nice. But she moves round and round in her little place and
she doesn't even _know_ of the wonderful things going on in the world
today! Do you think I'd trade with _her_?--social leader and all the
rest of it!" She was gathering together the bundles of asparagus. She
had finished her work. "Very sweet--very charming," she disposed of
Edith, "but she simply doesn't count. The world's moving away from her,
and she,"--Annie laughed with a mild scorn--"doesn't even know that!"

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

It was late when Ruth went to sleep that night; she and Annie talked
through the evening--of books Annie was reading, of the things which
were interesting her. She was rich in interests; ideas were as personal
things to her; she found personal satisfactions in them. She was
following things which Ruth knew little about; she had been long away
from the centers of books, and out of touch with awakened people. A
whole new world seemed to open from these things that were vital to
Annie; there was promise in them--a quiet road out from the hard things
of self. There were new poets in the world; there were bold new
thinkers; there was an amazing new art; science was reinterpreting the
world and workers and women were setting themselves free. Everywhere the
old pattern was being shot through with new ideas. Everywhere were new
attempts at a better way of doing things. She had been away from all
that; what she knew of the world's new achievement had seemed unreal, or
at least detached, not having any touch with her own life. But as
disclosed by Annie those things became realities--things to enrich one's
own life. It kindled old fires of her girlhood, fanned the old desire to
know. Personal things had seemed to quell that; the storm in her own
life had shut down around her. Now she saw that she, like those others
whom Annie scorned, had not kept that openness to life, had let her own
life shut her in. She had all along been eager for books, but had not
been fortunate in the things she had come upon. She had not had access
to large libraries--many times not even to small ones; she had had
little money for buying books and was so out of touch with the world
that she had not had much initiative in trying to get hold of things.
She felt now that she had failed miserably in that, but there were years
when she was like a hurt thing that keeps in hiding, most of all wanting
to escape more hurt. It had been a weakness--she clearly saw that now,
and it had been weakening to her powers. Most of the books she had come
upon were of that shut-in life Annie scorned, written from within that
static living, and for it. People in them had the feeling it was right
people should have, unless there were bad people in the book, and then
they were very definitely bad. Many of those books had been not only
unsatisfying, but saddening to her, causing her to feel newly apart from
the experiences of people of her kind.

But now Annie's books let her glimpse a new world--a world which
questioned, a world of protest, of experiment, a world in which people
unafraid were trying to find the truth, trying to build freshly, to
supplant things outworn with the vital forms of a new reality. It was
quickening. It made her eager. She was going to take some of those books
home, she would send for others, would learn how to keep in touch with
this new world which was emerging from the old. It was like breaking out
from a closed circle. It was adventure!

Even after she went to her room that night, late though it was, she did
not go at once to bed. She sat for a time looking off at the lights of
that town for which she had so long grieved, the town that had shut her
out. The fact that it had shut her out had been a determining thing in
her life, to her spirit. She wondered now if perhaps she had not
foolishly spent herself in grieving for a thing that would have meant
little could she have had it. For it seemed now that it had remained
very much a fixed thing, and now she knew that, with it all, she herself
had not been fixed. The things of which Annie talked, things men of this
new day were expressing, roused her like this, not because they were all
new, but because of her own inner gropings. Within herself she had been
stumbling toward some of those things. Here was the sure expression of
some halting thoughts of her own. It was exciting to find that there
were people who were feeling the things that, even in that timid,
uncertain way, she had come to feel by herself. She had been half afraid
to formulate some of the things that had come into her mind. This
gathered together the timid little shoots. She was excited about the
things of which Annie talked--those new ideals of freedom--not so much
because they were new and daring and illumining things, as because they
did not come all alien. There was something from within to go out to
them. In that--not that there were interesting things she could have
from without--but that she, opened to the new stimulus, could become
something from within, was the real excitation, the joy of the new
promise was there. And this new stir, this promise of new satisfactions,
let her feel that her life was not all mapped out, designed ahead. She
went to sleep that night with a wonderful new feeling of there being as
much for her in life as she herself had power to take.

And she woke with that feeling; she was eager to be up, to be out in the
sunshine. Annie, she found, had gone early to town with her vegetables.
Ruth helped eleven-year-old Dorothy, the eldest child, get off for
school and walked with her to the schoolhouse half a mile down the road.
The little girl's shyness wore away and she chatted with Ruth about
school, about teachers and lessons and play. Ruth loved it; it seemed to
set the seal of a human relationship upon her new feeling. What a
wonderful thing for Annie to have these children! Today gladness in
there being children in the world went out past sorrow in her own
deprivation. The night before she had said to Annie, "You have your
children. That makes life worth while to you, doesn't it?" And Annie,
with that hard, swift look of being ruthless for getting at the
truth--for getting her feeling straight and expressing it truly, had
answered, "Not in itself. I mean, it's not all. I think much precious
life has gone dead under that idea of children being enough--letting
them be all. _We_ count--_I_ count! Just leaving life isn't all; living
it while we're here--that counts, too. And keeping open to it in more
than any one relationship. Suppose they, in their turn, have that idea;
then life's never really lived, is it?--always just passed on, always
_put off_." They had talked of that at some length. "Certainly I want my
children to have more than I have," Annie said. "I am working that they
may. But in that working for them I'm not going to let go of the fact
that I count too. Now's my only chance," she finished in that grim
little way as one not afraid to be hard.

Thinking back to that it seemed to Ruth a bigger mother feeling than the
old one. It was not the sort of maternal feeling to hem in the mother
and oppress the children. It was love in freedom--love that did not hold
in or try to hold in. It would develop a sense of the preciousness of
life. It did not glorify self-sacrifice--that insidious foe to the
fullness of living.

Thinking of that, and going out from that to other things, she sat down
on a log by the roadside, luxuriating in the opulence and freshness of
the world that May morning, newly tuned to life, vibrant with that same
fresh sense of it, glad gratefulness in return to it, that comes after
long sickness, after imprisonment. The world was full of singing birds
that morning,--glorious to be in a world of singing birds! The earth
smelled so good! There were plum trees in bloom behind her; every little
breeze brought their fragrance. The grass under her feet was
springy--the world was vibrant, beautiful, glad. The earth seemed so
strong, so full of still unused powers, so ready to give.

She sat there a long time; she had the courage this morning to face the
facts of her life. She was eager to face them, to understand them that
she might go on understandingly. She had the courage to face the facts
relating to herself and Stuart. That was a thing she had not dared do.
With them, love _had_ to last, for love was all they had. They had only
each other. They did not dare let themselves think of such a thing as
the love between them failing.

Well, it had not failed; but she let herself see now how greatly it had
changed. There was something strangely freeing in just letting herself
see it. Of course there had been change; things always changed. Love
changed within marriage--she did not know why she should expect it to be
different with her. But in the usual way--within marriage--it would
matter less for there would be more ways of adapting one's self to the
changing. Then one could reach out into new places in life, gaining new
channels, taking on new things as old ones slipped away, finding in
common interests, common pleasures, the new adjustment for feeling. But
with them life had seemed to shut right down around them. And they had
never been able to relax in the reassuring sense of the lastingness of
their love. She had held herself tense in the idea that there was no
change, would be none. She had a feeling now of having tried too hard,
of being tired through long trying. There was relief in just admitting
that she was tired. And so she let herself look at it now, admitting
that she had been clutching at a vanished thing.

It would have been different, she felt, had the usual channels of living
been opened to them. Then together they could have reached out into new
experiences. Their love had been real--great. Related to living, surely
it could have remained the heart of life. Her seeing now that much of
the life had gone out of it did not bear down upon her with the great
sadness she would have expected. She knew now that in her heart she had
known for a long time that passion had gone. Facing it was easier than
refusing to see. It ceased to be a terrible thing once one looked at it.
Of this she was sure: love should be able to be a part of the rest of
life; the big relationship, but one among others; the most intense
interest, but one with other interests. Unrooted, detached, it might for
the time be the more intense, but it had less ways of saving itself. If
simply, naturally, they could have grown into the common life she felt
they might have gone on without too much consciousness of change,
growing into new things as old ones died away, half unconsciously making
adjustments, doubtless feeling something gone but in the sharing of new
things not left desolate through that sense of the passing of old ones.
Frightened by the thought of having nothing else, they had tried too
hard. She was tired; she believed that Stuart too was tired.

There was a certain tired tenderness in her thinking of him. Dear
Stuart, he loved easy pleasant living. It seemed he was not meant for
the too great tests, for tragically isolated love. She knew that he had
never ceased to miss the things he had let go--his place among men, the
stimulus of the light, pleasant social relationships with women. He was
meant for a love more flexibly related to living, a love big and real
but fitted more loosely, a little more carelessly, to life. There was
always so deep a contrition for his irritations with her. The whole
trouble was indicated right there, that the contrition should be all out
of proportion to the offence. It would have been better had he felt more
free to be irritated; one should not have to feel frightened at a little
bit of one's own bad temper--appalled at crossness, at hours of ennui.
Driving them back together after every drifting apart all of that made
for an intensity of passion--passion whipped to life by fear. But that
was not the way to grow into life. Flames kindled by fear made intense
moments but after a time left too many waste places between them and the
lives of men.

Today her hope for the future was in the opening of new places. She was
going back with new vision, new courage. They must not any longer cling
together in their one little place, coming finally to actual resentment
of one another for the enforced isolation. They must let themselves go
out into living, dare more, trust more, lose that fear of rebuff, hope
for more from life, _claim_ more. As she rose and started towards home
there was a new spring in her step. For her part, she was through with
that shrinking back! She hoped she could bring Stuart to share her
feeling, could inspire in him this new trust, new courage that had so
stimulated and heartened her. Her hope for their future lay there.

Climbing a hill she came in sight of the little city which they had
given up, for which they had grieved. Well, they had grieved too much,
she resolutely decided now. There were wider horizons than the one that
shut down upon that town. She was not conquered! She would not be
conquered. She stood on the hilltop exulting in that sense of being
free. She had been a weakling to think her life all settled! Only
cowards and the broken in spirit surrendered the future as payment for
the past. Love was the great and beautiful wonder--but surely one should
not stay with it in the place where it found one. Why, loving should
light the way! Far from engulfing all the rest of life it seemed now
that love should open life to one. Whether one kept it or whether one
lost it, it failed if it did not send one farther along the way. She had
been afraid to think of her love changing because that had seemed to
grant that it had failed. But now it seemed that it failed if it did not
leave her bigger than it had found her. Her eyes filled in response to
the stern beauty of that. Not that one stay with love in the same place,
but rather the meaning of it all was in just this: that it send one on.

Eyes still dimmed with the feeling of it, she stood looking as if in a
final letting go at that town off there on the bend of the river. It
became to her the world of shut-in people, people not going on, people
who loved and never saw the meaning of love, whose experiences were not
as wings to carry them, but as walls shutting them in. She was through
grieving for those people. She was going on--past them--so far beyond
them that her need for them would fall away.

She was conscious of an approaching horse and buggy and stepped aside;
then walked on, so aglow with her own thoughts that a passing by did not
break in upon her. She did not even know that the girl in the run-about
had stopped her horse. At the cry: "Oh--I'm so glad!" she was as
startled as if she had thought herself entirely alone.

It was a big effort to turn, to gather herself together and speak. She
had been so far away, so completely possessed that it took her an
instant to realize that the girl leaning eagerly toward her was Mildred
Woodbury.

Mildred was moving over on the seat, inviting her to get in. "I'm so
glad!" she repeated. "I went to Mrs. Herman's, and was so disappointed
to miss you. I thought maybe I'd come upon you somewhere," she laughed
gladly, though not without embarrassment.

There was a moment of wanting to run away, of really considering it. She
knew now--had remembered, realized--what it was about Mildred.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Her instinct to protect herself from this young girl was the thing that
gained composure for her. At first it was simply one of those physical
instincts that draw us back from danger, from pain; and then she threw
the whole force of her will to keeping that semblance of composure. Her
instinct was not to let reserves break down, not to show agitation; to
protect herself by never leaving commonplace ground. It was terribly
hard--this driving back the flood-tide of feeling and giving no sign of
the struggle, the resentment. It was as if every nerve had been charged
to full life and then left there outraged.

But she could do it; she could appear pleasantly surprised at Mildred's
having come to take her for a drive, could talk along about the little
things that must be her shield against the big ones. Something in her
had gone hard in that first moment of realizing who Mildred was. She was
not going to be driven back again! And so she forced herself to talk
pleasantly of the country through which they went, of Mildred's horse,
of driving and riding.

But it was impossible not to grow a little interested in this young
Mildred Woodbury. She sat erect and drove in a manner that had the
little tricks of worldliness, but was somehow charming in spite of its
artificiality. Ruth was thinking that Mildred was a more sophisticated
young person than she herself had been at that age. She wondered if
sophistication was increasing in the world, if there was more of it in
Freeport than there used to be.

They talked of Ruth's father, of Mildred's people, of the neighborhood
both knew so well. From that it drifted to the social life of the town.
She was amused, rather sadly amused, at Mildred's air of superiority
about it; it seemed so youthful, so facile. Listening to Mildred now
pictures flashed before her: she and Edith Lawrence--girls of about
fifteen--going over to the Woodburys' and eagerly asking, "Could we take
the baby out, Mrs. Woodbury?" "Now you'll be very, very careful, girls?"
Mrs. Woodbury would say, wrapping Mildred all up in soft pink things.
"Oh, _yes_, Mrs. Woodbury," they would reply, a little shocked that she
could entertain the thought of their not being careful. And then they
would start off cooing girlish things about the cunning little darling.
This was that baby--in spite of her determination to hold aloof from
Mildred there was no banishing it; no banishing the apprehension that
grew with the girl's talk. For Mildred seemed so much a part of the very
thing for which she had this easy scorn. Something in the way she held
the lines made it seem she would not belong anywhere else. She looked so
carefully prepared for the very life for which she expressed disdain.

She tried to forget the things that were coming back to her--how Mildred
would gleefully hold up her hands to have her mittens put on when she
and Edith were about to take her out, and tried too to turn the
conversation--breaking out with something about Mrs. Herman's children.
But it became apparent that Mildred was not to be put off. Everything
Ruth would call up to hold her off she somehow forced around to an
approach for what she wanted to say.

And then it came abruptly, as if she were tired of trying to lead up to
it. "I've been wanting to see you--Ruth," she hesitated over the name,
but brought it out bravely, and it occurred to Ruth then that Mildred
had not known how to address her. "When I heard you were here," she
added, "I was determined you shouldn't get away without my seeing you."

Ruth looked at her with a little smile, moved, in spite of herself, by
the impetuousness of the girl's tone, by something real that broke
through the worldly little manner.

"I don't feel as the rest of them do." She flushed and said it
hurriedly, a little tremulously; and yet there was something direct and
honest in her eyes, as if she were going to say it whether it seemed
nice taste or not. It reached Ruth, went through her self-protective
determination not to be reached. Her heart went out to Mildred's youth,
to this appeal from youth, moved by the freshness and realness beneath
that surface artificiality, saddened by this defiance of one who, it
seemed, could so little understand how big was the thing she defied, who
seemed so much the product of the thing she scorned, so dependent on
what she was apparently in the mood to flout. "I don't know that they
are to be blamed for their feeling, Mildred," she answered quietly.

"Oh, yes, they are!" hotly contended the girl. "It's because they don't
understand. It's because they _can't_ understand!" The reins had fallen
loose in her hand; the whip sagged; she drooped--that stiff, chic little
manner gone. She turned a timid, trusting face to Ruth--a light shining
through troubled eyes. "It's love that counts, isn't it,--Ruth?" she
asked, half humble, half defiant.

It swept Ruth's heart of everything but sympathy. Her hand closed over
Mildred's. "What is it, dear?" she asked. "Just what is it?"

Mildred's eyes filled. Ruth could understand that so well--what sympathy
meant to a feeling shut in, a feeling the whole world seemed against.
"It's with me--as it was with you," the girl answered very low and
simply. "It's--like that."

Ruth shut her eyes for an instant; they were passing something fragrant;
it came to her--an old fragrance--like something out of things past; a
robin was singing; she opened her eyes and looked at Mildred, saw the
sunshine finding gold in the girl's hair. The sadness of it--of youth
and suffering, of pain in a world of beauty, that reach of pain into
youth, into love, made it hard to speak. "I'm sorry, dear," was all she
could say.

They rode a little way in silence; Ruth did not know how to speak, what
to say; and then Mildred began to talk, finding relief in saying things
long held in. Ruth understood that so well. Oh, she understood it all so
well--the whole tumult of it, the confused thinking, the joy, the
passion,--the passion that would sacrifice anything, that would let the
whole world go. Here it was again. She knew just what it was.

"So you can see," Mildred was saying, "what you have meant to me."

Yes, she could see that.

They were driving along the crest of the hills back of the town. Mildred
pointed to it. "That town isn't the whole of the world!" she exclaimed
passionately, after speaking of the feeling that was beginning to form
there against herself. "What do I care?" she demanded defiantly. "It's
not the whole of the world!"

Ruth looked at it. She could see the Lawrence house--it had a high place
and was visible from all around; Mildred's home was not far from there;
her own old home was only a block farther on. She had another one of
those flashing pictures from things far back: Mrs. Woodbury--Mildred's
mother--standing at the door with a bowl of chicken broth for Mrs.
Holland--Ruth's mother--who was ill. "I thought maybe this would taste
good," she could hear Mrs. Woodbury saying. Strange how things one had
forgotten came back. Other things came back as for a moment she
continued to look at the town where both she and Mildred had been
brought up, where their ties were. Then she turned back to Mildred, to
this other girl who, claimed by passionate love, was in the mood to let
it all go. "But that's just what it is, Mildred," she said. "The trouble
is, it _is_ the whole of the world."

"It's the whole of the social world," she answered the look of surprise.
"It's just the same everywhere. And it's astonishing how united the
world is. You give it up in one place--you've about given it up for
every place."

"Then the whole social world's not worth it!" broke from Mildred. "It's
not worth--enough."

Ruth found it hard to speak; she did not know what to say. She had a
flashing sense of the haphazardness of life, of the power, the flame
this found in Mildred that the usual experiences would never have found,
of how, without it, she would doubtless have developed much like the
other girls of her world--how she might develop because of it--how human
beings were shaped by chance. She looked at Mildred's face--troubled,
passionate, a confused defiance, and yet something real there looking
through the tumult, something flaming, something that would fight, a
something, she secretly knew, more flaming, more fighting, than might
ever break to life in Mildred again. And then she happened to look down
at the girl's feet--the very smart low shoes of dull kid, perfectly
fitted, high arched--the silk stockings, the slender ankle. They seemed
so definitely feet for the places prepared, for the easier ways, not
fitted for going a hard way alone. It made her feel like a mother who
would want to keep a child from a way she herself knew as too hard.

"But what are you going to put in the place of that social world,
Mildred?" she gently asked. "There must be something to fill its place.
What is that going to be?"

"Love will fill its place!" came youth's proud, sure answer.

Ruth was looking straight ahead; the girl's tone had thrilled her--that
faith in love, that courage for it. It was so youthful!--so youthfully
sure, so triumphant in blindness. Youth would dare so much--youth knew
so little. She did not say anything; she could not bear to.

"Love can fill its place!" Mildred said again, as if challenging that
silence. And as still Ruth did not speak she demanded, sharply, "Can't
it?"

Ruth turned to her a tender, compassionate face, too full of feeling, of
conflict, to speak. Slowly, as if she could not bear to do it, she shook
her head.

Mildred looked just dazed for a moment, then so much as if one in whom
she had trusted, on whom she had counted for a great deal had failed her
that Ruth made a little gesture as if to say it was not that, as if to
say she was sorry it seemed like that.

Mildred did not heed it. "But it has with you," she insisted.

"It has _not_!" leaped out the low, savage answer that startled the
woman from whom it came. "It has not!" she repeated fiercely.

Her rage was against the feeling that seemed to trick one like that; the
way love _got_ one--made one believe that nothing else in the world
mattered but just itself. It wasn't fair! It was cruel! That made her
savage--savage for telling Mildred the other side of it, the side love
blinded her too. In that moment it seemed that love was a trap; it took
hold of one and persuaded one things were true that weren't true! Just
then it seemed a horrible thing the way love got one through lovely
things, through beauty and tenderness, through the sweetest things--then
did as it pleased with the life it had stolen in upon. Fiercely she
turned the other face, told Mildred what love in loneliness meant, what
it meant to be shut away from one's own kind, what that hurting of other
lives did to one's self, what isolation made of one, what it did to
love. Things leaped out that she had never faced, had never admitted for
true; the girl to whom she talked was frightened and she was frightened
herself--at what she told of what she herself had felt, feeling that she
had never admitted she had had. She let the light in on things kept in
the dark even in her own soul--a cruel light, a light that spared
nothing, that seemed to find a savage delight in exposing the things
deepest concealed. She would show the other side of it! There was a
certain gloating in doing it--getting ahead of a thing that would trick
one. And then that spent itself as passion will and she grew quieter and
talked in a simple way of what loneliness meant, of what longing for
home meant, of what it meant to know one had hurt those who had always
been good to one, who loved and trusted. She spoke of her mother--of her
father, and then she broke down and cried and Mildred listened in
silence to those only half-smothered sobs.

When Ruth was able to stop she looked up, timidly, at Mildred. Something
seemed to have gone out of the girl--something youthful and superior,
something radiant and assured. She looked crumpled up. The utter misery
in her eyes, about her mouth, made Ruth whisper: "I'm sorry, Mildred."

Mildred looked at her with a bitter little laugh and then turned quickly
away.

Ruth had never felt more wretched in her life than when, without Mildred
having said a word, they turned in the gate leading up to Annie's. She
wanted to say something to comfort. She cast around for something.
"Maybe," she began, "that it will come right--anyway."

Again Mildred only laughed in that hard little way.

When they were half way up the hill Mildred spoke, as if, in miserable
uncertainty, thinking things aloud. "Mrs. Blair has asked me to go to
Europe with her for the summer," she said, in a voice that seemed to
have no spring left in it. "She's chaperoning a couple of girls. I could
go with them."

"Oh, _do_, Mildred!" cried Ruth. "Do that!" It seemed to her wonderfully
tender, wonderfully wise, of Edith. She was all eagerness to induce
Mildred to go with Edith.

But there was no answering enthusiasm. Mildred drooped. She did not look
at Ruth. "I could do that," she said in a lifeless way, as if it didn't
matter much what she did.

When they said good-by Mildred's broken smile made Ruth turn hastily
away. But she looked back after the girl had driven off, wanting to see
if she was sitting up in that sophisticated little way she had. But
Mildred was no longer sitting that way. She sagged, as if she did not
care anything about how she sat. Ruth stood looking after her, watching
as far as she could see her, longing to see her sit up, to see her hold
the whip again in that stiff, chic little fashion. But she did not do
it; her horse was going along as if he knew there was no interest in
him. Ruth could not bear it. If only the whip would go up at just that
right little angle! But it did not. She could not see the whip at
all--only the girl's drooping back.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

When Mildred had passed from sight Ruth slowly turned toward the house.
She noticed the vegetable wagon there in front of the barn--so Annie had
come home. She turned away from the kitchen door she had been about to
enter; she did not want to talk to Annie just then. But when she had
passed around to the other side of the house she saw, standing with
their backs to her in the little flower garden, Annie and a woman she
was astonished to recognize as her sister Harriett.

She made a move toward the little hill that rose behind the house. She
would get away! But Mr. Herman appeared just then at the top of the
hill. He saw her; he must see that she had seen the others. So she would
have to stay and talk to Harriett. It seemed a thing she absolutely
could not do. It had come to seem she was being made some kind of sport
of, as if the game were to buffet her about between this feeling and
that, let her gain a little ground, get to a clearing, then throw her
back to new confusion. That day, anyway, she could bear no more of it.
It was hard to reply to Mr. Herman when he called something to her.
Annie heard their voices and then she had to join her and Harriett.

"Why, Ruth!" Annie cried in quick solicitude upon seeing Ruth's face,
"you went too far. How hateful of you," she laughed, as if feeling there
was something to laugh off, "to come looking like this just when I have
been boasting to your sister about how we've set you up!"

"You do look tired, Ruth," said Harriett compassionately.

Harriett said she had come for a little visit with Ruth, and Annie
proposed that they go up under the trees at the crest of the hill back
of the house. It was where Ruth had sat with Annie just the day before.
As she sat down there now it seemed it was ages ago since she and Annie
had sat there tying the asparagus into bunches.

Annie had come up with some buttermilk for them. As she handed Ruth hers
she gave her shoulder an affectionate little pat, as if, looking at her
face, she wanted to tell her to take heart. Then she went back to the
house, leaving the two sisters alone.

They drank their buttermilk, talking of it, of Annie's place, of her
children. In a languid way Ruth was thinking that it was good of
Harriett to come and see her; had she come the day before, she would
have been much pleased. In that worn way, she was pleased now; doubtless
it had been hard for Harriett to come--so busy, and not well. Perhaps
her coming meant real defiance. Anyway, it was good of her to come. She
tried to be nice to Harriett, to talk about things as if she liked
having her there to talk with. But that final picture of Mildred's
drooping back was right there before her all the time. As she talked
with Harriett about the price of butter and eggs--the living to be had
in selling them, she was all the while seeing Mildred--Mildred as she
had been when Ruth got into the buggy; as she said, "Love can take its
place!"--as she was when she drove away. She had a sick feeling of
having failed; she had failed the very thing in Mildred to which she had
elected to be faithful in herself. And _why_? What right had one to say
that another was not strong enough? How did one _know_? And yet she
wanted Mildred to go with Edith; she believed that she would--now. That
blighting sense of failure, of having been unfaithful, could not kill a
feeling of relief. Did it mean that she was, after all, just like Edith?
Had her venturing, her experience, left her much as she would have been
without it? Just before meeting Mildred she was strong in the feeling of
having gained something from the hard way she had gone alone. She was
going on! That was what it had shown her--that one was to go on. Then
she had to listen to Mildred--and she was back with the very people she
had felt she was going on past--one with those people she had so
triumphantly decided were not worth her grieving for them.

She had been so sure--so radiantly sure, happy in that sense of having,
at last, found herself, of being rid of fears and griefs and
incertitudes. Then she met Mildred. It came to her then--right while she
was talking with Harriett about what Flora Copeland was going to do now
that the house would be broken up--that it was just that thing which
kept the world conservative. It was fear for others. It was that feeling
she had when she looked down at Mildred's feet.

One did not have that feeling when one looked at one's own feet. Fear of
pain for others was quite unlike fear for one's self. Courage for one's
self one could gain; in the fires of the heart that courage was forged.
When the heart was warm with the thing one wanted to do one said no
price in pain could be too great. But courage for others had to be
called from the mind. It was another thing. When it was some one
else,--one younger, one who did not seem strong--then one distrusted the
feeling and saw large the pain. One _knew_ one could bear pain one's
self. There was something not to be borne in thinking of another's pain.
That was why, even among venturers, few had the courage to speak for
venturing. There was something in humankind--it was strongest in
womankind--made them, no matter how daring for themselves, cautious for
others. And perhaps that, all crusted round with things formal and
lifeless, was the living thing at the heart of the world's conservatism.

Harriett was talking of the monument Cyrus thought there should be at
the cemetery; Ruth listened and replied--seemed only tired, and all the
while these thoughts were shaping themselves in her inner confusion and
disheartenment. She would rather have stopped thinking of it, but could
not. She had been too alive when checked; there was too much emotion in
that inner confusion. She wondered if she would ever become sure of
anything; if she would ever have, and keep, that courage of confidence
which she had thought, for just a few radiant moments, she had. She
would like to talk to Annie about it, but she had a feeling that she was
not fit to talk to Annie. Annie was not one of those to run back at the
first thought of another's pain. That, too, Annie could face. Better let
them in for pain than try to keep them from life, Annie would say. She
could hear her saying it--saying that even that concern for others was
not the noblest thing. Fearing would never set the world free, would be
Annie's word. Not to keep people in the safe little places, but to shape
a world where there need not be safe little places! While she listened
to what Harriett said of how much such a monument as Cyrus wanted would
cost, she could hear Annie's sharp-edged little voice making those
replies to her own confusion, could hear her talking of a sterner,
braver people--hardier souls--who would one day make a world where fear
was not the part of kindness. Annie would say that it was not the women
who would protect other women who would shape the future in which there
need not be that tight little protection.

She sighed heavily and pushed back her hair with a gesture of great
weariness. "Poor Ruth!" it made Harriett murmur, "you haven't really got
rested at all, have you?"

She pulled herself up and smiled as best she could at her sister, who
had spoken to her with real feeling. "I did," she said with a little
grimace that carried Harriett back a long way, "then I got so rested I
got to thinking about things--then I got tired again." She flushed after
she had said it, for that was the closest they had come to the things
they kept away from.

"Poor Ruth," Harriett murmured again. "And I'm afraid," she added with a
little laugh, "that now I'm going to make you more tired."

"Oh, no," said Ruth, though she looked at her inquiringly.

"Because," said Harriett, "I've come to talk to you about something,
Ruth."

Ruth's face made her say, "I'm sorry, Ruth, but I'm afraid it's the only
chance. You see you're going away day after tomorrow."

Ruth only nodded; it seemed if she spoke she would have to cry out what
she felt--that in common decency she ought to be let alone now as any
worn-out thing should be let alone, that it was not fair--humane--to
talk to her now. But of course she could not make that clear to
Harriett, and with it all she did wonder what it was Harriett had to
say. So she only looked at her sister as if waiting. Harriett looked
away from her for an instant before she began to speak: Ruth's eyes were
so tired, so somber; there was something very appealing about her face
as she waited for the new thing that was to be said to her.

"I have felt terribly, Ruth," Harriett finally began, as if forcing
herself to do so, "about the position in which we are as a family. I'll
not go into what brought it about--or anything like that. I haven't come
to talk about things that happened long ago, haven't come with
reproaches. I've just come to see if, as a family, we can't do a little
better about things as they are now."

She paused, but Ruth did not speak; she was very still now as she
waited. She did not take her eyes from Harriett's face.

"Mother and father are gone, Ruth," Harriett went on in a low voice,
"and only we children are left. It seems as if we ought to do the best
we can for each other." Her voice quivered and Ruth's intense eyes,
which did not leave her sister's face, dimmed. She continued to sit
there very still, waiting.

"I had a feeling," Harriett went on, "that father's doing what he did
was as a--was as a sign, Ruth, that we children should come closer
together. As if father couldn't see his way to do it in his lifetime,
but did this to leave word to us that we were to do something. I took it
that way," she finished simply.

Ruth's eyes had brimmed over; but still she did not move, did not take
her eyes from her sister's face. She was so strange--as if going out to
Harriett and yet holding herself ready at any moment to crouch back.

"And so," Harriett pursued, all the while in that low voice, "that is
the way I talked to Edgar and Cyrus. I didn't bring Ted into it," she
said, more in her natural way, "because he's just a boy, and then--" she
paused as if she had got into something that embarrassed her--"well, he
and Cyrus not feeling kindly toward each other just now I thought I
could do better without Ted."

Ruth flushed slightly at the mention of the feeling between her
brothers; but still she did not speak, scarcely moved.

Harriett was silent a moment. "That's one of the reasons," she took it
up, "why I am anxious to do something to bring us together. I don't want
Ted to be feeling this way toward Cyrus. And Edgar, too, he seems to be
very bitter against. It makes him defiant. It isn't good for him. I
think Ted has a little disposition to be wild," she said in a
confidential tone.

Ruth spoke then. "I hadn't noticed any such disposition," she said
simply.

"Well, he doesn't go to church. It seems to me he doesn't--accept things
as he ought to."

Ruth said nothing to that, only continued to look at her sister,
waiting.

"So I talked to them," Harriett went on. "Of course, Ruth, there's no
use pretending it was easy. You know how Cyrus feels; he isn't one to
change much, you know." She turned away and her hand fumbled in a little
patch of clover.

"But we do want to do something, Ruth," she came back to it. "We all
feel it's terrible this way. So this is what Edgar proposed, and Cyrus
agreed to it, and it seems to me the best thing to do." She stopped
again, then said, in a blurred sort of voice, fumbling with the clover
and not looking at Ruth: "If you will leave the--your--if you will leave
the man you are--living with, promising never to see him again,--if you
will give that up and come home we will do everything we can to stand by
you, go on as best we can as if nothing had happened. We will try to--"

She looked up--and did not go on, but flushed uncomfortably at sight of
Ruth's face--eyes wide with incredulity, with something like horror.

"You don't _mean_ that, do you, Harriett?" Ruth asked in a queer, quiet
voice.

"But we wanted to do something--" Harriett began, and then again halted,
halted before the sudden blaze of anger in Ruth's eyes.

"And you thought _this_--" She broke off with a short laugh and sat
there a moment trying to gain control of herself. When she spoke her
voice was controlled but full of passion. "I don't think," she said,
"that I've ever known of a more monstrous--a more insulting proposal
being made by one woman to another!"

"Insulting?" faltered Harriett.

Ruth did not at once reply but sat there so strangely regarding her
sister. "So this is your idea of life, is it, Harriett?" she began in
the manner of one making a big effort to speak quietly. "This is your
idea of marriage, is it? Here is the man I have lived with for eleven
years. For eleven years we've met hard things together as best we
could--worked, borne things together. Let me tell you something,
Harriett. If _that_ doesn't marry people--tell _me_ something. If that
doesn't marry people--just tell me, Harriett, _what does_?"

"But you know you're not married, Ruth," Harriett replied,
falteringly--for Ruth's burning eyes never left her sister's face. "You
know--really--you're not married. You know he's not divorced, Ruth. He's
not your husband. He's Marion Averley's."

"You think so?" Ruth flung back at her. "You really think so, do you,
Harriett? After those years together--brought together by love, united
by living, by effort, by patience, by courage--I ask you again,
Harriett,--if the things there have been between Stuart Williams and me
can't make a marriage real--_what can_?"

"The law is the law," murmured Harriett. "He is married to her. He never
was married to you."

Ruth began hotly to speak, but checked it with a laugh and sat there