Part 12 (1/2)

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

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

Feeling the coldness in his own voice he realized how he was at the very start getting away from the thing he wanted to do, was estranging Amy by his resentment of her feeling about a thing she did not understand.

After all--as before, he quickly made this excuse for her--what more natural than that she should take on the feeling of these people she was thrown with, particularly when they were so very kindly in their reception of her?

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

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

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

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

For an instant he just stared at her. ”Insulting?” he faltered. ”I--I--”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He looked at her in surprise. Then, surprised anew, looked quickly away.

Feeling that he had failed, he tried to put it aside lightly. ”Oh, come now, Amy, you didn't think, did you, that you could marry a man of thirty-four who had never loved any woman?”

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

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

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