"Our dance."
With a swift little movement the girl turned a glowing face to the man standing before her. Flushed with dancing, keyed high in the pleasure and triumphs of the evening, she turned the same radiant face to Stuart Williams as he claimed their dance that she would have turned to almost anyone claiming a dance. It was something that came to life in the man's eyes as he looked down into her flushed face, meeting her happy, shining eyes, that arrested the flashing, impersonal smile of an instant before and underneath that impersonal gladness of youth there was a faint flutter of self.
He was of the "older crowd;" it happened that she had never danced with him before. He was a better dancer than the boys of her own set, but somehow that old impersonal joy in dancing was a lesser thing now than the sense of dancing with this man.
"That was worth coming for," he said quietly, when the dance and the encore to it were over and they found themselves by one of the doors opening out on the balcony.
She looked up with a smile. It was a smile curiously touched with shyness. He saw the color wavering in her sensitive, delicate face. Then he asked lightly: "Shall we see what's being dispensed from this punch-bowl?"
With their ice, they stood looking out into the moonlight over a wide stretch of meadow to far hills. "A fine night to ride over the hills and far away," he laughed at last, his voice lingering a little on the fancy.
She only laughed a little in reply, looking off there toward over the hills and far away. Watching her, he wondered why he had never thought anything much about her before. He would have said that Ruth Holland was one of the nice attractive girls of the town, and beyond that could have said little about her. He watched the flow of her slender neck into her firm delicate little chin, the lovely corners of her mouth where feeling lurked. The fancy came to him that she had not settled into flesh the way most people did, that she was not fixed by it. He puzzled for the word he wanted for her, then got it—luminous was what she was; he felt a considerable satisfaction in having found that word.
"Seems to me you and Edith Lawrence grew up in a terrible hurry," he began in a slow, teasing manner. "Just a day or two ago you were youngsters racing around with flying pigtails, and now here you are—all these poor young chaps—and all us poor old ones—fighting for dances with you. What made you hurry so?" he laughed.
The coquette in most normal girls of twenty rose like a little imp up through her dreaming of over the hills and far away. "Why, I don't know," she said, demurely; "perhaps I was hurrying to catch up with someone."
His older to younger person manner fell away, leaving the man delighting in the girl, a delightfully daring girl it seemed she was, for all that look of fine things he had felt in her just a moment before. He grew newly puzzled about her, and interested in the puzzle. "Would you like to have that someone stand still long enough to give you a good start?" he asked, zestful for following.
But she could not go on with it. She was not used to saying daring things to "older men." She was a little appalled at what she had done—saying a thing like that to a man who was married; and yet just a little triumphant in her own audacity, and the way she had been able to make him feel she was something a long way removed from a little girl with flying pigtails.
"I really have been grown up for quite a while," she said, suddenly grave.
He did not try to bring her back to the other mood,—that astonishing little flare of audacity; he was watching her changing face, like her voice it was sweetly grave.
The music had begun again—this time a waltz. A light hand upon her arm, he directed her back towards the dancing floor.
"I have this taken," she objected hesitatingly.
"This is an extra," he said.
She felt sure that it was not; she knew she ought to object, that it was not right to be treating one of the boys of her own crowd that way. But that consciousness of what she ought to be doing fell back—pale, impotent—before the thing she wanted to do....
They were silent for a little time after; without commenting on doing so, they returned to their place outside. "See?" she said presently, "the moon has found another hill. That wasn't there when we were here before."
"And beyond that are more hills," he said, "that we don't see even yet."
"I suppose," she laughed, "that it's not knowing where we would get makes over the hills and far away—fun."
"Well, anything rather than standing still." He said it under his breath, more to himself than to her. But it was to her he added, teasingly and a little lingeringly: "Unless, of course, one were waiting for someone to catch up with one."
She smiled without turning to him; watching her, the thought found its way up through the proprieties of his mind that it would be worth waiting a long time if, after the wait, one could go over the hills and far away with a girl through whom life glowed as he could see it glowed in this girl; no, not with a girl like this—boldly, humorously and a little tenderly he amended in his mind—but withthisgirl.
She wheeled about. "I must go back," she said abruptly. "This dance is with Will Blair—I must go back. I'll have a hard enough time," she laughed, a little nervously, "making it right with Louis Stephens."
"I'll tell him I heard it was an extra," he said.
She halted, looking up at him. "Did you hear that!" she demanded.
He seemed about to say some light thing, but that died away. "I wanted the dance," was his quiet reply.
It was a June evening a year later that Stuart Williams sat on the steps of the porch that ran round the side of his house, humoring the fox terrier who thought human beings existed to throw sticks for dogs. After a while the man grew tired of that theory of human existence, and bade the panting Fritz lie down on the step below him. From there Fritz would look up to his master appealingly, eyes and tail saying, "Now let's begin again." But he got no response, so, in philosophic dog fashion, soon stretched out for a snooze.
The man was less philosophic: he had not that gift of turning from what he wanted to what he could have.
A little later he would go to the rehearsal of the out-of-door play the Country Club was getting ready to give. Ruth Holland would be there: she too was in the play. Probably he would take her home, for they lived in the same neighborhood and a little apart from the others. It was Mrs. Lawrence who, the night of the first rehearsal, commented with relief for one more thing smoothly arranged upon their going the same way.
For five weeks now they had been going the same way; their talk on those homeward walks had been the lightest of talk, for the most part a laughing over things that had happened during the rehearsal. And yet the whole world had become newly alive, until tonight it seemed a tremulous, waiting world. That light talk had been little more than a pulling back from the pauses, little more than retreat, safeguard. It was the pauses that lived on with him, creating his dreams; her face as she turned it to him after a silence would sometimes be as if she had been caught into that world touched to new life—world that waited. They would renew the light talk as if coming back from something.
He let himself slip into dreaming now; he had told himself that that, at least, could work no one harm, and in quiet hours, when he smoked, relaxed, he was now always drawn over where he knew he must not let himself go. It was as if something stronger than he was all around him. One drooping hand caressed his dog; he drew in the fragrance from a rose trellis near by; the leaves of the big tree moved with a gentle little sound, a sound like the whisper of sweet things; a bird note—goodnight—floated through the dusk. He was a man whom those things reached. And in the last year, particularly in those last weeks, it had come to be that all those things were one with Ruth Holland; to open to them meant being drawn to her.
He would tell himself that that was wrong, mad; nothing he could tell himself seemed to have any check on that pull there was on him in the thought of her. He and his wife were only keeping up the appearance of marriage. For two years he had not had love. He was not a man who could learn to live without it. And now all the desirableness of life, hunger for love, the whole of earth's lure seemed to break in through the feeling for this girl—that wrong, wonderful feeling that had of itself flushed his heart to new life.
Sharply he pulled himself about, shifting position as if to affirm his change of thinking. It turned him from the outer world to his house; he saw Marion sitting in there at her desk writing a letter. He watched her, thinking about her, about their lives. She was so poised, so cool; it would seem, so satisfied. Was she satisfied? Did denial of life leave nothing to be desired? If there were stirrings for living things they did not appear to disturb her calm surface. He wondered if a night like this never touched old things in her, if there were no frettings for what she had put out of her life.
He watched her small, beautifully shaped dark head, the fine smooth hair that fell over the little ear he had loved to kiss. She was beautiful; it was her beauty that had drawn him to her. She was more beautiful than Ruth Holland, through whom it seemed all the beauty of the world reached him. Marion's beauty was a definite separate thing; his face went tender as he thought how Ruth Holland only grew beautiful in beauty, as if it broke through her, making her.
Once more he moved sharply, disturbing the little dog at his feet; he realized where his thoughts had again gone, how looking at his wife it was to this other girl he was drawn, she seeming near him and Marion apart. He grew miserable in a growing feeling of helplessness, in a sense of waiting disaster. It was as if the whole power of life was drawing him on to disaster. Again that bird call floated through the dusk; the gentle breeze stirred the fragrance of flowers; it came to seem that the world was beautiful that it might ensnare him, as if the whole power of the sweetness of life was trying to pull him over where he must not go. He grew afraid. He got the feeling that he must do something—that he must do it at once. After he had sat there brooding for half an hour he abruptly got up and walked in where his wife was sitting.
"Marion," he began brusquely, "I should like to speak to you."
She had been sitting with her back to the door; at his strange address of her she turned round in surprise; she looked startled when she saw his strained face.
"We've been married about six years, isn't it?"
He had come a little nearer, but remained standing. He still spoke in that rough way. She did not reply but nodded slightly, flushing.
"And now for two years we—haven't been married?"
She stiffened and there was a slight movement as if drawing back. She did not answer.
"I'm thirty-four and you're a little less than that." He paused and it was more quietly, though none the less tensely that he asked: "Is it your idea that we go through life like this?"
She was gathering together the sheets of paper on her desk. She did not speak.
"You were angry at me—disappointed. I grant you, as I did at the time, that it was a silly affair, not—not creditable. I tried to show you how little it meant, how it had—just happened. Two years have passed; we are still young people. I want to know—do you intend this to go on? Are our whole lives to be spoiled by a mere silly episode?"
She spoke then. "Mere silly episode," she said with a high little laugh, "seems rather a slight way to dispose of the fact that you were untrue to me." She folded her letter and was putting it in the envelope. It would not go in and she refolded it with hands not steady.
He did not speak until she had sealed the letter and was sitting there looking down at her hands, rubbing them a little, as if her interest was in them. "Marion," he asked, and his voice shook now, "doesn't it ever seem to you that life is too valuable to throw away like this?" She made no reply and angered by her unresponsiveness he added sharply: "It's rather dangerous, you know."
She looked up at him then. "Is this a threat?" she asked with a faint, mocking smile.
He moved angrily, starting to leave the room. "Have you no feeling?" he broke out at her. "Is this all youwantfrom life?"
She colored and retorted: "It was not the way I expected to live when I married you."
He stood there doggedly for a moment, his face working with nervousness. "I think then," he said roughly, "that we'd better be decent enough to get a divorce!" At what he saw in her face he cried passionately: "Oh no, you don't believe in divorce—but you believe inthis!"
"Was itIwho brought it about?" she cried, stung to anger.
She had risen and for an instant they stood there facing each other. "Haven't you any humanity?" he shot rudely at her. "Don't you everfeel?"
She colored but drew back, in command of herself again. "I do not desecrate my feelings," she said with composure; "I don't degrade my humanity."
"Feeling—humanity!" he sneered, and wheeled about and left the room.
He started at once for his rehearsal. He was trembling with anger and yet underneath that passion was an unacknowledged feeling of relief. It had seemed that he had to do something; now he told himself that he had done what he could. He walked slowly through the soft night, seeking control. He was very bitter toward Marion, and yet in his heart he knew that he had asked for what he no longer wanted. He quickened his step toward the Lawrences', where they were to hold the rehearsal, where he would find Ruth Holland.
After the maelstrom of passion had thrown her out where life left her time to think about what she had felt, Ruth Holland would wonder whether there was something in her that made her different from the good people of the world. Through it all she did not have the feeling that it would seem she would have; what she did did not make her feel as she knew, when she came to think it out, she would be supposed to feel about such a thing. In hours that would be most condemned she had had a simple feeling of life as noble. What would be called the basest things she had done had seemed to free something within her that made her more kind, more generous, more tender, made her as a singing part of a fine, beautiful world. Her degradation had seemed to burn away all that was not pure, giving her a sense of being lifted up; it was as if through this illicit love a spiritual fount was unsealed that made her consciously one with life at its highest. Afterwards she wondered about it, wondered whether she was indeed different from people who were good, or whether it could be that hearts had been shown, not as they were, but as it was deemed meet they should be shown.
When she and Deane, with Edith and Will Blair, went home from the dance that night, something new breathed through the night. It was hard to join in the talk; she wanted to be alone, alone with that new stir. She was gentle with Deane as they stood for a moment at the door. She felt tender toward him. A little throb of excitement in her voice, the way her eyes shone, made him linger there with her a moment or two. It was as if he wanted to say something but the timid, clumsy words he spoke just before leaving were, "That sure is a peach of a dress. You had them all beat tonight, Ruth," and Ruth went into the house knowing now for sure how impossible it would be ever to think of Deane "that way." In the hour before she went to sleep what she meant by "that way" was a more living thing than it had ever been before.
The year which followed was not a happy one; it was a disturbed, a fretted year; girlhood was too ruffled for contentment in the old things, and yet she was not swept on. The social life of the town brought her and Stuart Williams together from time to time. They always had several dances together at the parties. It was those dances that made the party for her. If he were not there, the evening was a dead thing. When he was, something came to life in her that made everything different. She would be excited; she had color; her eyes shone. It made her gay, as an intoxicant may make one gay. Though when she danced with him she went curiously silent; that stilled her. After going home she would lie awake for hours, live over every slightest thing he had said, each glance and move. It was an unreal world of a new reality—quickened, heightened, delirious, promising.
In that first year she sometimes wondered if it was what would be called a flirtation. It did not seem so to her, and it was true that after that first night at the Country Club the quality of flirtation somehow fell away. Afterwards, when it became the thing that made her life, she looked back in wonderment to the light little way it had begun. That too did not seem as it should be—that a thing of such tremendous and ruthless power, a thing that swept her whole life on at its will, should come into life in a way so slight, so light, so much of chance. At first it was just the faintest little breath; but it stirred something, it grew, it became a great wind that there was no force anywhere to combat. In that first year there was between them, unspoken of, a consciousness of feeling touched in the other, a sense of the disturbance, the pull. It seemed very wonderful to her that just his presence in the room could make her feel alive in a way she had never felt alive before. And it was sweet almost beyond belief, it was intoxicating, to come to know that her presence was that same strange wine to him. She had seen his eyes anxiously rove a crowded room and stop with her, his face lighting. She loved remembering his face once at a card party of the older crowd where she had been tardily summoned by a disappointed hostess. He had been in the room several minutes, she watching him unseen. He was not looking anxiously about this time, as she had seen him do at the dancing parties. She thought he looked tired as he and his wife came in, not as if anticipating pleasure. Then he saw her and she never forgot that leap of glad surprise in his eyes, the quick change in him, the new buoyancy.
She would have supposed, thinking back to it afterward, that she would have drawn back; that before feeling really broke through, a girl such as she, reared as she had been, a part of such a society, a girl, as they afterward said, who should have known right from wrong would, in that time of its gathering, have drawn back from so shameful a thing as love with another woman's husband. It was as mystifying to her that she did not fight against it as it was that it should have come. She did not understand the one nor the other. Certainly it was not as she would have supposed it would be had she heard of such a thing. Something seemed to have caught her up, to have taken her. She was appalled at times, but the truth was that she was carried along almost without resistance; ideas of resistance were there, but they were pale things, not charged with power. She would suppose, had she known the story only through hearing it, that she would have thought intensely and become wretched in the thought of Mrs. Williams. Perhaps if Mrs. Williams had been a plain little woman, or a sad looking one, that would have come home to her harder. But one would not readily pity Marion Williams, or get the feeling of wronging her. As Marion Averley she had been the reigning girl of the town. Ruth, ten years younger, had not come far enough out from her little girl's awe of Marion Averley, the young lady, to be quick in getting the feeling of wronging Marion Williams, the wife. Perhaps one would be more slow in getting a feeling of wronging the most smartly dressed woman in the room than would be the case with the wife dowdy or drab. Mrs. Williams, while not radiating happiness, seemed somehow impervious to unhappiness, and certainly to any hurt another woman could bring her. She had an atmosphere of high self-valuation. While she never appeared to be having an especially good time she gave a sense of being perfectly able to command a better one had it pleased her to do so.
People had supposed that Marion Averley would make a brilliant marriage. Her grandfather had made his money in lumber, in those early days of lumber kings on the Mississippi. Locally they were looked upon as rich people. Marion had gone to a fashionable school, to Europe. People of the town said there was nothing "local" about her. Other girls had been as much away and yet would return seeming just a part of the town. That was why everyone was surprised when the Averleys announced Marion's engagement to Stuart Williams. He was distinctly local and his people were less important than hers. He had come home from college and gone into business. His father had a small canning factory, an industry that for years had not grown much, remaining one of the small concerns in a town of rapidly growing manufactories. Stuart went into business with his father and very soon there were expansions, new methods; he brought imagination to bear upon it, and a big fund of young man's energy, until it rapidly came up from a "nice little business" to one of the things that counted in the town. He had a talent for business; his imagination worked that way and he was what they called a hustler. He soon became a part of a number of things, both personal affairs and matters of public concern. He came to be alluded to as one of the prominent young business men. Even before Marion Averley married him people were saying that he would make money.
They liked her for marrying him. They said it showed that there was more to her than they had supposed, that there was warmth she did not show. For she must have married him for the good old reason that she had fallen in love with him. Their engagement brought Stuart Williams into a new social conspicuousness, though he had the qualities—in particular a certain easy, sunny manner—that had made him popular all along. During the engagement people spoke of the way Marion seemed to thaw out; they liked her much better than they had in the days of being awed by her sophistication, her aloofness.
After their marriage the Williams' were leaders of the young married set. Their house was the gayest place in town; Stuart Williams had the same talent in hospitality that he had for business—growing, perhaps, out of the same qualities. He was very generally and really deeply liked; they called him a good fellow, a lovable chap. For about four years people spoke of it as a successful marriage, though there were no children. And then, just what it was no one knew, but the Williams' began to seem different, going to their house became a different thing. The people who knew Marion best had a feeling that she was not the same after the visit of that gay little Southern matron whom she had known in school at Washington. It was very gay at the Williams' through that visit, and then Marion said she was tired out and they were going to draw in for a little, and somehow they just never seemed to emerge from that drawing in. Her friends wondered; they talked about how Stuart and this friend of Marion's had certainly hit it off wonderfully; some of them suspected, but Marion gave no confidences. She seemed to carry her head higher than ever; in fact, in some curious way she seemed to become Marion Averley again while Stuart Williams concentrated more and more upon the various business affairs he was being drawn into. It came about that the Williams' were less and less mentioned when the subject of happy marriages was up, and when time had swung Ruth Holland and Edith Lawrence into the social life of the town it was the analytical rather than the romantically minded citizens who were talking about them.
Perhaps life would have been quite another thing for a number of people if the Country Club had not decided to replenish its treasury by giving a play. Mrs. Lawrence was chairman of the entertainment committee. That naturally brought Edith and Ruth into the play, and one night after one of those periods of distraction into which the organizer of amateur theatricals is swept it was Mrs. Lawrence who exclaimed, "Stuart Williams! Why couldn't he do that part?"—and Stuart Williams, upon learning who was in the cast, said he would see what he could do with it.
Again, at the close of the first rehearsal, as they stood about in the hall at the Lawrences', laughing over mishaps, it was Mrs. Lawrence who said, "You and Ruth go the same way, don't you, Stuart?"
Tonight they were going that way after the final rehearsal. It was later than usual; they went slowly, saying little. They had fallen silent as they neared Ruth's home; they walked slowly and in silence outside the fence; paused an instant at the gate, then, very slowly, started up the walk which led to the big white square house and came to a stop beneath the oak tree which was so near the house that its branches brushed the upper window panes.
They stood there silent; the man knew that he ought to go at once; that in that silence the feeling which words had so thinly covered would break through and take them. But knowing he should go seemed without power to make him go. He watched the girl's slightly averted face. He knew why it was averted. He felt sure that he was not alone in what he felt.
And so he stood there in the sweetness of that knowing, the sweetness of that understanding why she held herself almost rigid like that, feeling surging higher in him in the thought that she too was fighting feeling. The breeze moved the hair on her temples; he could see the throb in her uncovered throat, her thin white dress moving over her quick breathing. Life was in her, and the desire for life. She seemed so tender, so sensitive.
He moved a step nearer her, unable to deny himself the sweetness of confirming what it was so wonderful to think. "I won't be taking you home tomorrow night," he said.
She looked at him, then swiftly turned away, but not before he had seen her eyes.
"Shall you care?" he pressed it, unsteadily.
He knew by her high head, her tenseness, that she was fighting something back; and he saw the quivering of her tender mouth.
She cared! Shedidcare. Here was a woman who cared; a woman who wanted love—his love; a woman for whom life counted, as it counted for him. After barren, baffled days, days of denial and humiliation, the sweetness of being desired possessed him overwhelmingly as they stood there in the still, fragrant night before the darkened house.
He knew that he must go; hehadto go; it was go now, or—. But still he just stood there, unable to do what he knew he should do, reason trying to get hold of that moment of gathering passion, training striving to hold life.
It was she who brought them together. With a smothered passionate little sob she had swayed toward him, and then she was in his arms and he was kissing her wet eyes, that tender mouth, the slim throbbing throat.
There followed three years of happiness wrung from wretchedness, years in which the splendor of love would blaze through the shame of concealment, when joy was always breaking out through fear, when moments of beautiful peace trembled there in the ugly web of circumstance. Life was flooded with beauty by a thing called shameful.
Her affairs as a girl went on just the same; the life on the surface did not change. She continued as Ruth Holland—the girl who went to parties with the boys of her own set, one of her particular little circle of girls, the chum of Edith Lawrence, the girl Deane Franklin liked best. But a life grew underneath that—all the time growing, crowding. She appeared to remain a girl after passion had swept her over into womanhood. To be living through the most determining, most intensifying experience of life while she appeared only to be resting upon the surface was the harassing thing she went through in those years before reality came crashing through pretence and disgrace brought relief.
She talked to but one person in those years. That was Deane. The night he told her that he loved her she let him see.
That was more than a year after the night Stuart Williams took her home from that last rehearsal; Deane was through school now and had come home to practice medicine. She had felt all along that once he was at home for good she might have to tell Deane; not alone because he would interfere with her meetings with Stuart, but because it seemed she could not bear the further strain of pretending with him. And somehow she would particularly hate pretending with Deane. Though the night she did let him see it was not that there was any determination for doing so, but because things had become too tense that night and she had no power to go on dissembling.
It began in irritation at him, the vicious irritation that springs out against the person who upsets a plan he knows nothing about, and cannot be told of.
She had come in from an errand down town and was about to dress hurriedly to go over to Edith's for dinner. She was going to make some excuse for getting away from there early and would have an hour with Stuart, one of those stolen hours that often crowded, agitated, a number of the hours before it, one of those hours of happiness when fear always stood right there, but when joy had a marvellous power to glow in an atmosphere of ugly things. A few nights before she had tried to arrange one of those times, and just as she was about to leave the house, saying some vague thing about running in somewhere—there was no strict surveillance on members of the Holland household—a friend who had been very ill and was just beginning to go about had come to see her and she had been obliged to sit there through the hour she had been living for, striving to crowd down what she was feeling and appear delighted that her friend was able to be about, chatting lightly of inconsequential things while she could think of nothing but Stuart waiting for her, had had to smile while she wanted to sob in the fury of disappointed passion.
The year had brought many disappointments like that, disappointments which found their way farther into the spirit because they dared not show on the surface. Of late there had been so many of them that it was growing hard to hold from her manner her inner chafing against them. There were times when all the people who loved her seemed trying to throw things in her way, and it was the more maddening because blindly done. It was hurting her relations with people; she hated them when they blunderingly stepped in the way of the thing that had come to mean everything to her.
She was particularly anxious about this night for Stuart was going out of town on a business trip and she would not see him again for more than a week. It was her grandfather who made the first difficulty; as she was going up the stairs he called, "You going over to the Lawrences' tonight, Ruth?"
When she had answered yes he continued: "It wouldn't be much out of your way, would it, to run on over to the Allens'?"
She hesitated; anything her grandfather asked of her was hard to refuse, not only because she loved him and because he was old, but because it hurt her to see how he missed the visiting around among his old friends that his rheumatism had of late cut him off from.
"Why—no," she answered, wondering just how she could get it in, for it did take her out of her way, and old Mr. Allen would want to talk to her; it was going to be hard to get away from Edith's anyway, and the time would be so short, for Stuart would have to leave for his train at half past nine. She quickly decided that she would go over there before dinner, even though it made her a little late. Maybe she didn't need to comb her hair, after all.
She was starting up the stairs when her grandfather called: "Wait a minute. Come here, Ruth."
She came back, twirling the fingers of one hand nervously. Her grandfather was fumbling in the drawer of his secretary. "I want you to take this letter—tell him I got it yesterday—" He stopped, peering at the letter; Ruth stood there with hand clenched now, foot tapping. "Why no, that's not the one," he rambled on; "I must have put it up above here. Or could it—"
"Oh, I'm in a hurry, grandfather!" cried the girl.
He closed the drawer and limped over to his chair. "Just let it go, then," he said in the hurt voice of one who has been refused a thing he cannot do for himself.
"Now, grandfather!" Ruth cried, swiftly moving toward him. "How can you be sosilly—just because I'm a little nervous about being late!"
"Seems to me you're always a little nervous about something lately," he remarked, rising and resuming the leisurely search for the letter. "You young folks make such hard work of your good times nowadays. Anybody'd think you had the world on your shoulders."
Ruth made no reply, standing there as quietly as she could, waiting while her grandfather scanned a letter. "Yes, this is the one," he finally said. "You tell him—" She had the letter and was starting for the stairs while listening to what she was to tell, considering at the same time how she'd take the short cut across the high-school ball park—she could make it all right by half past six. Feeling kindly toward her grandfather because it was going to be all right, after all, she called back brightly: "Yes, grandfather, I'll get it to him; I'll run right over there with it first thing."
"Oh, look here, Ruth!" he cried, hobbling out to the hall. "Don't do that! I want you to go in the evening. He'll not be home till eight o'clock. He's going—"
"Yes, grandfather," she called from the head of the stairs in a peculiarly quiet voice. "I see. It's all right."
Then she could not find the things she wanted to put on. There was a button off her dress and her thread broke in sewing it. She was holding herself very tight when her mother came leisurely into the room and stood there commenting on the way Ruth's hair was done, on the untidiness of her dressing-table, mildly reproving her for a growing carelessness. Then she wandered along about something Ruth was to tell Edith's mother. Ruth, her trembling fingers tangling her thread, was thinking that she was always to tell somebody something somebody else had said, take something from one person to another. The way people were all held together in trivial things, that thin, seemingly purposeless web lightly holding them together was eternally throwing threads around her, keeping her from the one thing that counted.
"There!" escaped from her at last, breaking the thread and throwing the dress over her head. Her mother sauntered over to fasten it for her, pausing to note how the dress was wearing out, speaking of the new one Ruth must have soon, and who should make it. "Oh, I'm in ahurry, mother!" Ruth finally cried when her mother stopped to consider how the dress would have had more style if, instead of buttoning down the back, it had fastened under that fold.
"Really, my dear," Mrs. Holland remonstrated, jerking the dress straight with a touch of vexation, "I must say that you are getting positively peevish!"
As Ruth did not reply, and the mother could feel her body tightening, she went on, with a loving little pat as she fastened the dress over the hip, "And you used to be the most sweet-tempered girl ever lived."
Still Ruth made no answer. "Your father was saying the other night that he was sure you couldn't be feeling well. You never used to be a bit irritable, he said, and you nearly snapped his head off when he wanted—just to save you—to drive you over to Harriett's."
Though the dress was all fastened now, Ruth did not turn toward her mother. Mrs. Holland added gently: "Now that wasn't reasonable, was it?"
The tear Ruth had been trying to hold back fell to the handkerchief she was selecting. No, it wouldn't seem reasonable, of course; her father had wanted to help her, and she had been cross. It was all because she couldn't tell him the truth—which was that she hadn't told him the truth, that she wasn't going to Harriett's for an hour, that she was going to do something else first. There had been a moment of actually hating her father when, in wanting to help her, he stepped in the way of a thing he knew nothing about. That, it seemed, was what happened between people when things could not be told.
Mrs. Holland, seeing that Ruth's hand was unsteady, went on, in a voice meant to soothe: "Just take it a little easier, dear. What under the sun have you got to do but enjoy yourself? Don't get in such a flutter about it." She sighed and murmured, from the far ground of experience: "Wait till you have a real worry."
Ruth was pinning on her hat. She laughed in a jerky little way and said, in a light voice that was slightly tremulous: "I did get a little fussed, didn't I? But you see I wanted to get over to Edith's before dinner time. She wants to talk to me about her shower for Cora Albright."
"But you have all evening to talk that over, haven't you?" calmly admonished Mrs. Holland.
"Why, of course," Ruth answered, a little crisply, starting for the door.
"Your petticoat's showing," her mother called to her. "Here, I'll pin it up for you."
"Oh, let itgo!" cried Ruth desperately. "I'll fix it at Edith's," she added hurriedly.
"Ruth, are you crazy?" her mother demanded. "Going through the streets with your petticoat showing! I guess you're in no such hurry as that."
It was while she was pinning up the skirt that Mrs. Holland remarked: "Oh, I very nearly forgot to tell you; Deane's going over there for you tonight."
Then to the mother's utter bewilderment and consternation Ruth covered her face with her hands and burst into sobs.
"Why, mydear," she murmured; "why, Ruthdear, whatisthe matter?"
Ruth sank down on the bed, leaning her head against the foot of it, shaking with sobs. Her mother stood over her murmuring, "Why, my dear, whatisthe matter?"
Ruth, trying to stop crying, began to laugh. "I didn't know he was coming! I was so surprised. We've quarrelled!" she gulped out desperately.
"Why, he was just as natural and nice as could be over the 'phone," said Mrs. Holland, pouring some water in the bowl that Ruth might bathe her eyes. "Really, my dear, it seems to me you make too much of things. He wanted to come here, and when I told him you were going to be at Edith's, he said he'd go there. I'm sure he was just as nice as could be."
Ruth was bathing her eyes, her body still quivering a little. "Yes, I know," she spluttered, her face in the water; "he is that way when—after we've quarrelled."
"I didn't know you and Deane ever did quarrel," ventured Mrs. Holland. "When you do, I'll warrant it's your fault." She added, significantly: "Deane's mighty good to you, Ruth." She had said several things like that of late.
"Oh, he's good enough," murmured Ruth from the folds of the towel.
"Now, powder up a little, dear. There! And now just take it a little easy. Why, it's not a hit like you to be so——touchy."
She followed Ruth downstairs. "Got that letter?" the grandfather called out from his room.
"I'll send Ted with it, father," Mrs. Holland said hastily, seeing Ruth's face.
A sudden surge of love for her mother almost swept away Ruth's self-command. It was wonderful that some one wanted to help her. It made her want to cry.
Her mother went with her to the porch. "You look so nice," she said soothingly. "Have a good time, dearie."
Ruth waved her hand without turning her face to her mother.
Tears were right there close all through that evening. The strain within was so great—(whatwasshe going to do about Deane?)—that there was that impulse to cry at the slightest friendliness. She was flushed and tired when she reached Edith's, and Mrs. Lawrence herself went out and got her a glass of water—a fan, drew up a comfortable chair. The whole house seemed so kindly, so favoring. Contrasted with her secret turmoil the reposefulness, friendliness of the place was so beautiful to her that taut emotions were ready to give. Yet all the while there was that inner distress about how to get away, what to say. The affectionate kindness of her friends, the appeal of their well-ordered lives as something in which to rest, simply had no reach into the thing that dominated her.
And now finally she had managed it; Deane had come before she could possibly get away but she had said she would have to go up to Harriett's, that she must not be too late about it. Edith had protested, disappointed at her leaving so early, wanting to know if she couldn't come back. That waved down, there had been a moment of fearing Edith was going to propose going with her; so she had quickly spoken of there being something Harriett wanted to talk to her about. She had a warm, gentle feeling for Edith when finally she saw the way clearing. That was the way it was, gratitude to one who had moved out of her way gave her so warm a feeling that often she would impulsively propose things letting her in for future complications.
As she was saying goodnight there was another moment of wanting terribly to cry. They were so good to her, so loving—and what would they think if they knew? Her voice was curiously gentle in taking leave of them; there was pain in that feeling of something that removed her from these friends who cared for her, who were so good to her.
She asked Deane if he hadn't something else to do for an hour, someone to run in and see while she visited with Harriett. When he readily fell in with that, saying he hadn't been to the Bennetts' since coming home and that it would be a good time to go there, she grew suddenly gay, joking with him in a half tender little way, a sort of affectionate bantering that was the closest they came to intimacy.
And then at the very last, after one thing and then another had been disposed of, and just as her whole being was fairly singing with relief and anticipation, the whole thing was threatened and there was another of those moments of actually hating one who was dear to her.
They had about reached the corner near Harriett's where she was going to insist Deane leave her for the Bennetts' when they came upon her brother Ted, slouching along, whistling, flipping in his hand the letter he was taking to his grandfather's old friend.
"Hello," he said, "where y' goin'?"
"Just walking," said Ruth, and able to say it with a carelessness that surprised her.
"Oh," said Ted, with a nonchalance that made her want to scream out some awful thing at him, "thought maybe you were making for Harriett's. She ain't home."
She would like to have pushed him away! She would have liked to push him way off somewhere! She dug her nails down into her palm; she could hardly control the violent, ugly feeling that wanted to leap out at him—at this "kid brother" whom she adored. Why need he have said justthat?—that particular thing, of all things! But she was saying in calm elderly sister fashion, "Don't lose that letter, Ted," and to Deane, as they walked on, "Harriett's at a neighbor's; I'll run in for her; she's expecting me to."
But it left her weak; her legs were trembling, her heart pounding; there seemed no power left at the center of her for holding herself in one.
And now she was rid of Deane! She had shaken them all off; for that little time she was free! She hurried toward the narrow street that trailed off into the country. Stuart would be waiting for her there. Her joy in that, her eagerness, rushed past the dangers all around her, the thing that possessed her avoiding thought of the disastrous possibilities around her as a man in a boat on a narrow rushing river would keep clear of rocks jutting out on either side. Sometimes the feeling that swept her on did graze the risks so close about her and she shivered a little. Suppose Harriett were at the Bennetts' when Deane got there! Suppose Deane said something when they got home; suppose Ted said something that wouldn't fit in with what Deane said; suppose Deane got to Harriett's too soon—though she had told him not to be there till after half past nine. Hadn't Deane looked queer at the last? Wouldn't he suspect? Wouldn't everybody suspect, with her acting like this? And once there was the slightest suspecting....
But she was hurrying on; none of those worries, fears, had power to lay any real hold on the thing that possessed her; faster and faster she hurried; she had turned into the little street, had passed the last house, turned the bend in the road, and yes! there was Stuart, waiting for her, coming to her. Everything else fell away. Nothing else in the world mattered.
Ten o'clock found Ruth sitting on the porch at home with her mother and father, her brother Cyrus and Deane. Her father was talking with Deane about the operation that had been performed on the book-keeper in Mr. Holland's bank; Cyrus talked of somebody's new touring car, the number of new machines there were in town that year; her mother wondered where some of the people who had them got the money for them. The talk moved placidly from one thing to another, Mr. Holland saying at intervals that he must be going to bed, his wife slapping at the mosquitoes and talking about going inside—both delaying, comfortably stupid.
Ruth was sitting on the top step leaning back against the porch pillar. She said little, she was very tired now. Something in this dragging talk soothed her. It seemed safe just because it was so commonplace; it was relaxing. She was glad to be back to it—to the world of it; in returning safely to it she felt a curiously tender feeling for it, a perhaps absurd sense of having come through something for it. She could rest in it while within herself she continued to live back in that hour with Stuart, that hour which struggle and fear and the passionate determination to have in spite of everything had made terribly intense. They had closed themselves in with that little while of love, holding it apart from everything else, and yet every minute of it was charged with the consciousness of what was all around them. They had clung to that hour with a desperate passion, the joy of the moment that was there always stabbed with pain for a moment passing. At the last they had clung to each other as if time too—time, over which they had no control—was going to beat them apart. So much had been hard that in returning she had a warm feeling of gratitude to all of them for not making it harder for her, not questioning, exposing her; relief was so great that they were all newly dear for thus letting her alone. She had managed all right with Deane, the clumsy arrangement she had been forced into appeared to have just that haphazardness which characterizes most of the arrangements of life. Her mother had merely asked what the Lawrence's had for dinner; her father joked about the way she had trained the roses in the back yard. Strangely enough instead of feeling she had outraged them, been unworthy this easy, affectionate intercourse, she had a sense, now that she had again come through a precarious thing safely, of having saved them from something they knew not of, a strange lifted-up feeling of bearing something for them. Certainly that would not seem the feeling she should be having, but there was the odd part of it: the feelings she had were so seldom those she would expect herself to have.
Her mother and father had gone indoors; Cyrus sat out there with her and Deane for a time. Ruth did not love Cyrus as she loved Ted; he had always had too superior a manner with her for her feeling to be more than the perfunctory thing which sometimes passes for personal affection in families. It was simply that she had never admitted, even to herself, that she did not love him. He belonged to the set just older than Ruth's, though she and Deane and their friends were arriving now at the time of ceasing to be a separate entity as the young crowd and were being merged in the group just above them. That contributed to Cyrus's condescension, he being tempered for condescension.
When she and Deane were alone the talk lagged, Ruth sitting there at the head of the steps leaning against the pillar, he a few steps below her, sprawled out in awkward boyish fashion, looking up at her from time to time as she said something. Her silence did not make him feel cut off from her; the things she said were gently said; her tired smile was sweet. He spoke several times of going, but lingered. He was held by something in Ruth; it stirred something in him, not knowing that he was drawn by what another man had brought into life. He drew himself up and stole timid glances at Ruth as she looked out into the night, feeling something new in her tonight, something that touched the feeling that had all the time been there in him, growing as he grew, of itself waiting for the future as simply and naturally as all maturing things wait for the future. Ruth was the girl he had all the time cared for; he was shy about emotional things—awkward; he had had almost no emotional life; he had all the time been diffident about what she made him feel and so they had just gone along for a little time longer than was usual as boy and girl. But something sweet, mysterious, exhaling from her tonight liberated the growing, waiting feeling in him. It took him as he had not been taken before; he watched Ruth and was stilled, moved, drawn.
Finally, as if suddenly conscious of a long silence, she turned to him with something about the plans for Cora Albright's wedding—she was to be a bridesmaid and he an usher. She went on talking of the man Cora was to marry, a man she met away from home and had fallen desperately in love with. He associated the light of her face, the sweetness of her voice, with the things of romance of which she talked. All in a moment his feeling for her, what her strange, softened mood touched in him, leaped up, surging through him, not to be stayed. He moved nearer her. "You know, Ruth," he said, in queer, jerky voice, "Ilove you."
She gave a start, drew a little back and looked at him with a certain startled fixity as if he had stopped all else in her. For the moment she just looked at him like that, startled, fixed.
"Could you care for me at all, Ruth?" he asked wistfully, and with a bated passionateness.
And then she moved, and it seemed that feeling, too, moved in her again; there was a flow of emotions as she sat looking at him now. And then her strangely shining eyes were misty; her face quivered a little and very slowly she shook her head.
"Don't do that, Ruth," he said quickly, in a voice sharp with pain. "Don't do that! You don'tknow—maybe you hadn't thought about it—maybe—" He broke off, reached out for her hands, and could only stammer, "Oh, Ruth!—I love you so!"
He had her hands; he was clutching them very tight; he looked up at her again, imploring. She started to shake her head again, but did not really do it. She seemed about to speak, but did not. What could she say to Deane—how make him understand?—unless she told him. She thought of the years she had known him, how much they had been together, how good he had been to her. Again her eyes were misty. It was all so tangled. There was so much pain.
Feeling her softening, her tenderness, he moved nearer, her two hands pressed together so tight in his that it hurt her. "It wouldn't be so bad, would it, Ruth?" he urged wistfully, with a little laugh that broke with emotion. "You and I—mightn't life go pretty well for us?"
She turned away, looking out into the night. Feeling something in her that he did not understand he let her hands go. She put one of them up, still further averting her face, lost to him in the picture forming itself before her of how life would be if love came right; what it would mean not to have to hide, but to have those who cared for her happy in her happiness; what it would mean to give herself to love without fear, to wear her joy proudly before the world, revealing her womanhood. She was not thinking of what life with Deane would be but of what love that could have its place would be: telling her mother and father and Edith, being able to show the pride of being loved, the triumph of loving. Sitting there, turning her face from this friend who loved her, she seemed to be turning it to the years awaiting her, years of desperately clutching at happiness in tension and fear, not understood because unable to show herself,—afraid, harassed, perhaps disgraced. She wanted to take her place among women who loved and were loved! She did not want to be shut away from her friends, not seeming to understand what she understood so well. This picture of what life would be if love could have its place brought home to her what it meant to love and perpetually conceal, stealing one's happiness from the society in which one lived. Why could it not have gone right for her too, as it had for Cora and would for Edith? She too wanted a wedding, she too wanted rejoicing friends.
She hid her face in her hands. Her body was quivering.
The boy's arm stole round her shoulders. She was feeling—maybe she did care. "Ruth," he whispered, "love does mean something to you, doesn't it?"
She raised her head and looked at him. And that look was a thing Deane Franklin never forgot; all the years did not blur his memory of it—that flaming claim for love that transformed her face.
And then it was lost in contrition, for she saw what he had seen, and what he hoped from that; in her compunction for having let him see what was not for him, the tender, sorrowing look, the impulsive outreaching of her hand, there was the dawn of understanding.
At first he was too bewildered to find words. Then: "You care for some one else?" he groped unbelievingly.
She looked away, but nodded; her tears were falling.
He moved a little away and then sat there quite still. A breeze had come up and the vines beat against the porch, making a sound that like the flaming look of a moment ago he never forgot.
She knew that he must be wondering; he knew her life there, or what seemed her life. He must be wondering who it was she cared for like that.
She laid her hand upon his arm; and when he turned to her she did not say anything at all, but the appeal that looked through pain perhaps went where words could not have gone.
"But you're not happy!" he exclaimed, in a sort of harsh exulting in that.
She shook her head; her eyes were brimming over.
He looked away from her, his own hurt and surprise rousing a savage thing in him that did not want to do what the pleading pain of her eyes so eloquently asked of him. He had always thought thathewas to have Ruth. Well, he was not to have her—there were ugly things which, in that first moment, surged into his disappointment. Some one else was to have her. But she was not happy! Defeated feeling wrenched its own sorry satisfaction from that.
"Why aren't you happy?" he asked of her abruptly, roughly.
She did not answer, and so he had to look at her. And when he saw Ruth's face his real love for her broke through the ugliness of thwarted passion. "Can't you tell me, Ruth?" he asked gently.
She shook her head, but the concern of his voice loosed feeling she was worn out with holding in. Her eyes were streaming now.
His arm went round her shoulder, gently, as if it would shield, help. His love for her wrenched itself free—for that moment, at least,—from his own hurt. "Maybe I can help you, Ruth," he was murmuring.
He went away from there that night not knowing more than that; it was merely that she let him see. He knew now that there was some big thing in her life he had known nothing about; that he had not understood Ruth, though he had known her through all the years and had thought he knew her so well. He was bewildered, his pain was blunted in that bewilderment. There was a sick sense of life as all different, but he was too dazed then for the pain that came later with definite knowing. He went home that night and because he could not sleep tried to read a medical book; usually that took all his mind, for the time other things would not exist for him. But that was not true tonight; that world of facts could not get him; he lived right on in the world of his own feeling. He was not to have Ruth; he did not seem able to get a real sense of that either, there was just a sick feeling about it rather than actual realization, acceptance. And what did it mean? Surely he knew Ruth's life, the people she went with; it was always he, when he was at home, Ruth went about with. Someone away from home? But she had been very little away from home. Who could it be? He went over and over that. It came to seem unreal; as if there were some misunderstanding, some mistake. And yet, that look.... His own disappointment was at times caught up into his marvel at her; that moment's revelation of what her caring could be was so wonderful as to bear him out of the fact that it was not for him she cared. That was the way it was all through, his love for her deepening with his marvel at her, the revelation of what she felt for another man claiming more and more of himself for her. It was a thing he would have scoffed at if told of, it was a thing he could not somehow justify even to himself, but it was true that the more he saw of what love meant to Ruth the more Ruth came to mean to him.
In those next few months, the months before he actually knew, there were times when he could almost persuade himself that there was something unreal about it all, torturous wonderings as to who the man could be trailing off into the possibility of there being no man, because he knew of none; sometimes he tried to persuade himself that this passionate feeling he had glimpsed in Ruth was a thing apart from any particular man—for whowasthe man? Sometimes he could, for a moment, let in the hope that since she could care like that she would care for him. Though he more than half knew he deluded himself in that; there was, now that his eyes were opened, that in Ruth's manner to indicate something in her life which did not appear on the surface. He saw how nervous she was—how strained at times, how worried and cross, which was not like Ruth at all. There were times when her eyes were imploring, times when they were afraid, again there were moments of that lovely calm, when feeling deep and beautiful radiated from her, as it had that night they sat on the steps and, drawn by something in her, he had to tell her that he loved her. She did queer unreasonable things, would become exasperated at him for apparently nothing at all. Once when she had told him she was going somewhere with her mother he later saw her hurrying by alone; another time she told him she was going to Edith's, and when he called up there, wanting to take them both with him for a long trip he had to make into the country, Edith said Ruth had not been there. Thoughts that he did not like, that he could not believe, came into his mind. He was not only unhappy, but he grew more and more worried about Ruth.
That went on for several months, and then one day late that same summer she came to him with the truth. She came because she had to come. He was a doctor; he was her friend; she was in a girl's most desperate plight and she had no one else to turn to. It was in his office that she told him, not looking at him, her face without color and drawn out of shape, her voice quick, sharp, hard, so unlike Ruth's sweet voice that without seeing her he would not have known it. She threw out the bare facts at him as she sat there very straight, hands gripped. He was stupefied at first, but it was fury which then broke through, the fury of knowing it wasthis, that not only was he not to have Ruth, but that another manhadher, the fury that rose out of the driving back of all those loose ends of hope that had eased pain a little. AndRuth—this! He little knew what things he might not have said and done in those first moments of failing her, turning on her because he himself was hurt beyond his power to bear. And then Ruth spoke to him. "But I thought you believed in love, Deane," she said, quietly.
"Love!" he brutally flung back at her.
"Yes, Deane, love," she said, and the simplicity, the dignity of her quiet voice commanded him and he had to turn from himself to her. She was different now; she looked at him, steadily, proudly. Out of the humiliation of her situation she raised a proud face for love; love could bring her disgrace, it could not strip her of her own sense of the dignity of loving. Her power was in that, in that claim for love that pain and humiliation could not beat back.
"I noticehe'snot here," he sneered, still too overwhelmed to be won from his own rage to her feeling.
"I thought it better for me to come," she said simply, and as she said it and he remembered her drawn, wretched face in telling him, he was quieted a little by a sense of what it had cost her to come. "Because," she added, "you're my friend, you know."
He did not say anything, miserably wondering what she now thought of him as her friend.
"Oh, Deane," she broke out, "don't be hard! If you could know what he's suffering! Being a man—being a little older—what's that? If you can understand me, Deane, you've got to understand him, too!"
He stood there in silence looking at Ruth as, looking away from him now, she brooded over that. In this hour of her own humiliation her appeal was for the man who had brought it upon her. "How you love him!" escaped from him, in bitterness, and yet marvelling.
She turned to him then in her swift way, again, as on that night of his first seeing, her face transformed by that flaming claim for love; it was as if life was shining triumphant through the cloud of misery it had brought down around her. He could not rage against that look; he had no scorn for it. It lighted a country between them which words could not have undarkened. They came together there in that common understanding of the power and beauty of love. He was suddenly ashamed, humbled, feeling in her love a quality upon which no shameful circumstance could encroach. And after that she found relief in words, the words she had had to deny herself so long. It was as if she found it wonderfully good to talk, in some little measure linking her love, as love wants to link itself, with the other people of the world, coming within the human unit. Things which circumstances had prisoned in her heart, too intensified by solitude, leaped out like winged things let loose. But in that hour of talking with him, though words served her well, it was that proud, flaming claim for love which again and again lighted her face that brought him into understanding, winning him for her against his own love of her.
In the year which followed, that last year before circumstances closed in too tight and they went away, it was he who made it possible for Ruth to move a little more freely in the trap in which she found herself. He helped her in deceiving her family and friends, aided them in the ugly work of stealing what happiness they could from the society in which they lived. He did not like doing it. Neither did he like attending the agonies of child-birth, or standing impotently at the bed of the dying. It might seem absurd, in trying to explain one's self, to claim for this love the inevitability of the beginning and the end of life, and yet, seeing it as he saw it he did think of it, not as a thing that should or should not be, but as a thing that was; not as life should or should not be lived, but as life. This much he knew: that whatever they might have been able to do at the first, it had them now. They were in too powerful a current to make a well considered retreat to shoals of safety. No matter what her mood might have been in the beginning, no matter what she could have done about it then, Ruth was mastered not master now. Lovehadher—he saw that too well to reason with her. What he saw of the way all other people mattered so much less than the passion which claimed her made him feel, not that Ruth was selfish, but that the passion was mastering; the way she deceived made him feel, not that she was deceitful, but that love like that was as unable to be held back in the thought of wrong to others as in the consideration of safety for one's self; the two were equally inadequate floodgates. Not that those other things did not matter—he knew how they did make her suffer—but that this one thing mattered overwhelmingly more was what he felt in Ruth in those days when she would be thought to be with him and would be with Stuart Williams.
For himself that was a year of misery. He saw Ruth in a peculiarly intimate way, taken as he was into the great intimacy of her life. His love for her deepened with his knowing of her; and anxiety about her preyed upon him all the time, passionate resentment that it should have gone like that for her, life claiming her only, as it seemed, to destroy her.
He never admitted to himself how much he really came to like Stuart Williams. There seemed something quixotic in that; it did not seem natural he should have any sympathy with this man who not only had Ruth's love, but was endangering her whole life. Yet the truth was that as time went on he not only came to like him but to feel a growing concern for him.
For the man changed in that last year. It was not only that he looked older—harassed, had grown so much more silent, but Deane as a physician noticed that he was losing weight and there was a cough that often made him look at him sharply. A number of times Ruth said, "I don't think Stuart's well," but she looked so wretched in saying it that he always laughed at her. The Williams' were not patients of his, so he felt that professional hesitance, even though he thought it foolish professionalism, in himself approaching Stuart about his health. Once when he seemed particularly tired and nervous Deane did venture to suggest a little lay-off from work, a change, but Stuart had answered irritably that he couldn't stop work, and didn't want to go away, anyhow.
It was almost a year after the day Ruth came to him steeled for telling what had to be told that the man of whom she that day talked came to tell him what he had been suspecting, that he had tuberculosis and would have to take that lay-off Deane had been hinting at. It seemed it was either go away or die, probably, he added, with an attempted laugh, it was go away and die, but better go away, he thought, than stay there and give his friends an exhibition in dying.
They talked along over the surface of it, as is people's way, Deane speaking mildly of tuberculosis, how prevalent, how easily controlled, how delightful Arizona was, the charms of living out-of-doors, and all the time each of them knew that the other was not thinking of that at all, but thinking of Ruth.
Finally, bracing himself as for a thing that was all he could do, Stuart spoke of her. "Ruth said she was coming in to see you about something this afternoon. I thought I'd get in first and tell you. I wondered what you'd think—what we'd better do—"
His voice trailed off miserably. He turned a little away and sat there in utter dejection.
And as he looked at him it came to Deane that love could be the most ruthless, most terrible thing in the world. People talked to him afterwards about this man's selfishness in taking his own pleasure, his own happiness, at the cost of everyone else. He said little, for how could he make real to anyone else his own feeling about what he had seen of the man's suffering, utter misery, as he spoke of the girl to whom he must bring new pain. Some one spoke to him afterwards of this "light love" and he laughed in that person's face. He knew that it was love bathed in pain.
A new sense of just how hideous the whole thing was made him suddenly demand: "Can't you—doanything about it? Isn't there anyway?—any way you can get a divorce?" he bluntly asked.
"Mrs. Williams does not believe in divorce," was the answer, spoken with more bitterness than Deane had ever heard in any voice before.
Deane turned away with a little exclamation of rage, rage that one person should have this clutch on the life of another, of two others—and one of them Ruth—sickened with a sense of the waste and the folly of it,—for what wasshegetting out of it? he savagely put to himself. How could one get anything from life simply by holding another from it?
"Does she know anything about Ruth?" he asked with an abrupt turn to Stuart.
"She has mentioned her name several times lately and looked at me in doing it. She isn't one to speak directly of things," he added with a more subtle bitterness than that of a moment before. They sat there for a couple of minutes in silence—a helpless, miserable silence.
When, after that, Deane stepped out into the waiting-room he found Ruth among those there; he only nodded to her and went back and told Stuart that she was there. "But it's only three," said he helplessly, "and she said she was coming at four."
"Well, I suppose she came earlier than she intended," Deane replied, about as helplessly, and went over and stood looking out the window. After a moment he turned. "Better get it over with, hadn't you! She's got to be told," he said, a little less brusquely, as he saw the man wince,—"better get it over with."
Stuart was silent, head down. After a moment he looked up at Deane. It was a look one would turn quickly away from. Again Deane stood looking from the window. He was considering something, considering a thing that would be very hard to do. After a moment he again abruptly turned around. "Well, shall I do it!" he asked quietly.
The man nodded in a wretched gratefulness that went to Deane's heart.
So he called Ruth in from the waiting-room. He always remembered just how Ruth looked that day; she had on a blue suit and a hat with flowers on it that was very becoming to her. She looked very girlish; he had a sudden sense of all the years he had known her.
The smile with which she greeted Deane changed when she saw Stuart sitting there; the instant's pleased surprise went to apprehension at sight of his face. "What's the matter!" she asked sharply.
"Stuart's rather bummed up, Ruth," said Deane.
Swiftly she moved over to the man she loved. "What is it!" she demanded in quick, frightened voice.
"Oh, just a bad lung," Deane continued, not looking at them and speaking with that false cheerfulness so hard fought for and of so little worth. "Don't amount to much—happens often—but, well—well, you see, he has to go away—for awhile."
He was bending over his desk, fumbling among some papers. There was no sound in the room and at last he looked up. Stuart was not looking at Ruth and Ruth was standing there very still. When she spoke her voice was singularly quiet. "When shall we go?" she asked.