Part 11 (1/2)
She caught herself, reddened, then turned to Amy with a quick smile.
”And it's just his sympathetic nature, isn't it? That's exactly Deane--taking the part of one who's down.”
”And then, too, men feel differently about those things,” murmured another one of the young matrons of Deane's crowd.
Their manner of seeming anxious to smooth something over, to get out of a difficult situation, enraged Amy, not so much against them as because of there being something that needed smoothing over, because Deane had put himself and her in a situation that was difficult. How did it look?--what must people think?--his standing up for a woman the whole town had turned against! But she was saying with what seemed a sweet gravity, ”I'm sure Deane would be sorry for any woman who had been so--unfortunate. And she,” she added bravely, ”was a dear old friend, was she not?”
The woman who had commiserated with Edith now nodded approval at Amy.
”You're sweet, my dear,” she said, and the benign looks of them all made her feel there was something for her to be magnanimous about, something queer. Her resentment intensified because of having to give that impression of a sweet spirit. And so people talked about Deane's standing up for this Ruth Holland! _Why_ did they talk?--just what did they say? ”There's more to it than I know,” suspicion whispered. In that last half hour it was hard to appear gracious and interested; she saw a number of those little groups in which voices were low and faces were trying not to appear eager.
She wished she knew what they were saying; she had an intense desire to hear more about this thing which she so resented, which was so roiling to her. It fascinated as well as galled her; she wanted to know just how this Ruth Holland looked, how she had looked that night of the wedding, what she had said and done. The fact of being in the very house where Ruth Holland had been that last night she was with her friends seemed to bring close something mysterious, terrible, stirring imagination and curiosity. Had she been with Deane that night? Had he taken her to the wedding?--taken her home? She hardened to him in the thought of there being this thing she did not know about. It began to seem he had done her a great wrong in not preparing her for a thing that could bring her embarra.s.sment. Everyone else knew about it! Coming there a bride, and the very first thing encountering something awkward! She persuaded herself that her pleasure in this party, in this opening up of her life there, was spoiled, that Deane had spoiled it. And she tormented herself with a hundred little wonderings.
She and Cora Albright went home together in Edith's brougham. Cora was full of talk of Ruth Holland, this new development, Ruth's return, stirring it all up again for her. Amy's few discreet questions brought forth a great deal that she wanted to know. Cora had a worldly manner, and that vague sympathy with evil that poetizes one's self without doing anything so definite as condoning, or helping, the sinner.
”I do think,” she said, with a little shrug, ”that the town has been pretty hard about it. But then you know what these middle-western towns are.” Amy, at this appeal to her sophistication, gravely nodded. ”I do feel sorry for Ruth,” Cora added in a more personal tone.
”Will you go to see her?” Amy asked, rather pointedly.
”Oh, I couldn't do that,” replied Cora. ”My family--you know,--or perhaps you don't know. I'm related to Mrs. Williams,” she laughed.
”Oh!” Amy e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, aghast, and newly fascinated by the horror, what somehow seemed the impossibleness of the whole thing--that she should be talking of Ruth Holland to a woman related to Mrs. Williams!
”I suppose _she_ felt terribly,” Amy murmured.
Cora laughed a little. ”Oh, I don't know. It never seemed to me that Marion would do much feeling. Feeling is so--ruffling.”
”She looks,” said Amy, a little aggressively, ”as though she might not show all she feels.”
”Oh, I suppose not,” Cora agreed pleasantly. ”Perhaps I do Marion an injustice. She may have suffered in silence. Certainly she's kept silence. Truth is, I never liked her so very well. I like Ruth much the better of the two. I like warmth--feeling.”
She was leaning forward and looking from the window. ”That's the Hollands',” she said. And under her breath, compa.s.sionately, she murmured, ”Poor Ruth!”
”I should think you _would_ go and see her,” said Amy, curiously resentful of this feeling.
With a little sigh Cora leaned back in the luxurious corner. ”We're not free to do what we might like to do in this life,” she said, looking gravely at Amy and speaking as one actuated by something larger than personal feeling. ”Too many people are a.s.sociated with me for me to go and see Ruth--as, for my own part, I'd gladly do. You see it's even closer than being related to Marion. Cyrus Holland,--Ruth's brother--married into my family too. Funny, isn't it?” she laughed at Amy's stare. ”Yes, Cyrus Holland married a second cousin of Stuart Williams' wife.”
”Why--” gasped Amy, ”it's positively weird, isn't it?”
”Things are pretty much mixed up in this world,” Cora went on, speaking with that good-natured sophistication which appealed to Amy as worldly.
”I think one reason Cy was so bitter against Ruth, and kept the whole family so, was the way it broke into his own plans. He was in love with Louise at the time Ruth left; of course all her kith and kin--being also Marion's--were determined she should not marry a Holland. Cy thought he had lost her, but after a time, as long as no one was quite so bitter against Ruth as he, the opposition broke down a little--enough for Louise to ride over it. Oh, yes, in these small towns everybody's somehow mixed up with everyone else,” she laughed. ”And of course,” she went on more gravely, ”that is where it is hard to answer the people who seem so hard about Ruth. It isn't just one's self, or even just one's family--though it broke them pretty completely, you know; but a thing like that reaches out into so many places--hurts so many lives.”
”Yes,” said Amy, ”it does.” She was thinking of her own life, of how it was clouding her happiness.
”One has to admit,” said Cora, in the tone of summing it all up, ”that just taking one's own happiness is thorough selfishness. Society as a whole is greater than the individual, isn't it?”
That seemed to Amy the heart of it. She felt herself as one within society, herself faithful to it and guarding it against all who would do it harm; hard to the traitor, not because of any personal feeling--she wished to make that clear to herself--but because society as a whole demanded that hardness. After she had bade Cora good-by and as she was about to open the door of the house Deane had prepared for her, she told herself that it was a matter of taking the larger view. She was pleased with the phrase; it seemed to clear her own feeling of any possible charge of smallness.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Despite the fact that he knew he was going to be late getting home for dinner, Dr. Franklin was sending his car very slowly along the twelve-mile stretch of road that lay between him and home. This was not so much because it was beautiful country through which he went, and the spring freshness in the softness of late afternoon was grateful to him, nor because too tired for any kind of hurrying, as it was that he did not want to cover those twelve miles before he had thought out what he was going to say to Amy.