"Ruth's had a hard time, Edith. It's been no light life for her--you don't have to do more than look in her eyes to know that. I wish you could have heard the way she asked about you--poured out questions about you. She loves you just as she always did, Edith. She's sorrowed for you all through these years."

A tear brimmed over from Edith's blue eyes and rolled slowly--unheeded--down her cheek. His heart warmed to her and he took hope as he watched that tear.

"She was crazy to know about your children. That's been a grief to her, Edith. Ruth should be a mother--you know that. You must know what a mother she would have made. If you were to take your youngsters to see her--" He broke off with a laugh, as if there was no way of expressing it.

Edith looked away from him, seemed to be staring straight into a rose bush at the side of the porch.

"Couldn't you?" he gently pressed.

She turned to him. "I'd like to, Deane," she said simply, "but, "--her dimmed eyes were troubled--"I don't see how I could."

"Why not?" he pursued. "It's simple enough--just go and see her. We might go together, if that would seem easier."

She was pulling at a bit of sewing in her lap. "But, Deane, it _isn't_ simple," she began hesitatingly. "It isn't just one's self. There's society--the whole big terrible question. If it were just a simple, individual matter,--why, the truth is I'd love to go and see Ruth. If it were just a personal thing--why don't you know that I'd forget everything--except that she's Ruth?" Her voice choked and she did not go on, but was fumbling with the sewing in her lap.

He hitched his chair forward anxiously, concentrated on his great desire to say it right, to win Edith for Ruth. Edith was a simple sort of being--really, a loving being; if she could only detach herself from what she pathetically called the whole terrible question--if he could just make her see that the thing she wanted to do was the thing to do.

She looked up at him out of big grieving eyes, as if wanting to be convinced, wanting the way opened for the loving thing she would like to do.

"But, Edith," he began, as composedly and gently as he could, for she was so much a child in her mentality it seemed she must be dealt with gently and simply, "_is_ it so involved, after all? Isn't it, more than anything else, just that simple, personal matter? Why not forget everything but the personal part of it? Ruth is back--lonely--in trouble. Things came between you and Ruth, but that was a long time ago and since that she's met hard things. You're not a vindictive person; you're a loving person. Then for heaven's sake why _wouldn't_ you go and see her?"--it was impossible to keep the impatience out of that last.

"I know," she faltered, "but--society--"

"Society!" he jeered. "_Forget_ society, Edith, and be just a human being! If _you_ can forget--forgive--what seemed to you the wrong Ruth did _you_--if _your_ heart goes out to her--then what else is there to it?" he demanded impatiently.

"But you see,"--he could feel her reaching out, as if thinking she must, to the things that had been said to her, was conscious of her mother's thinking pushing on hers as she fumbled, "but one _isn't_ free, Deane.

Society _has_ to protect itself. What might not happen--if it didn't?"

He tried to restrain what he wanted to say to that--keep cool, wise, and say the things that would get Edith. He was sure that Edith wanted to be had; her eyes asked him to overthrow those things that had been fastened on her, to free her so that the simple, human approach was the only one there was to it, justify her in believing one dared be as kind, as natural and simple and real as one wanted to be. He was sure that in Edith's heart love for her friend was more real than any sense of duty to society.

"But after all what is society, Edith?" he began quietly. "Just a collection of individuals, isn't it? Why must it be so much harder than the individuals comprising it? If it is that--then there's something wrong with it, wouldn't you think?"

He looked around at the sound of a screen door closing. Edith's mother had stepped out on the porch. He knew by her startled look, her quick, keen glance at him, that she had heard his last words. She stepped forward holding up her hands in mock dismay, with a laughing: "What a large, solemn issue for an early morning conversation!"

Deane tried to laugh but he was not good at dissembling and he was finding it hard to conceal his annoyance at the interruption. Talking to Mrs. Lawrence was very different from talking to Edith. Edith, against her own loving impulses, tried to think what she thought she ought to think; Mrs. Lawrence had hardened into the things she thought should be thought, and at once less loving and more intelligent than Edith, she was fixed where her daughter was uncertain, complacent where Edith was troubled. She was one of those women who, very kind to people they accept, have no tendrils of kindness running out to those whom they do not approve. Her qualities of heart did not act outside the circle of her endors.e.m.e.nt. With the exception of Ruth's brother Cyrus, no one in the town had been harder about her than Edith's mother. He had all the time felt that, let alone, Edith would have gone back to Ruth.

He had risen and pulled up a chair for Mrs. Lawrence and now stood there fumbling with his hat, as if about to leave. It seemed to him he might as well.

"Why, my dears!" exclaimed the older woman with a sort of light dryness, "pray don't let me feel I have broken up a philosophic discussion."

"Deane was asking me to go and see Ruth, mother," said Edith, simply and not without dignity.

He saw her flush, her quick look up at him, and then the slight tightening of her lips.

"And doesn't it occur to Deane," she asked pleasantly, "that that is rather a strange thing to ask of you?"

"She is very lonely, Deane says," said Edith tremulously.

Mrs. Lawrence was threading a needle. "I presume so," she answered quietly.

Deane felt the blood rising in him. Somehow that quiet reply angered him as no sharp retort could have done. He turned to Edith, rather pointedly leaving her mother out. "Well," he asked bluntly, "will you go?"

Edith's eyes widened. She looked frightened. She stole a look at her mother, who had serenely begun upon her embroidery.

"Why, Deane!" laughed the mother, as if tolerantly waving aside a preposterous proposal, "how absurd! Of course Edith won't go! How could she? Why should she?"

He made no reply, fearing to let himself express the things which--disappointed--he was feeling.

Mrs. Lawrence looked up. "If you will just cast your mind back," she said, her voice remaining pleasant though there was a sting in it now, "to the way Ruth treated Edith, I think it will come home to you, Deane, that you are asking a rather absurd thing."

"But Edith says,"--he made a big effort to speak as quietly as she did--"that that personal part of it is all right with her. She says that she would really like to go and see Ruth, but doesn't think she can--on account of society."

Mrs. Lawrence flushed a little at his tone on that last, but she seemed quite unruffled as she asked: "And you see no point in that?"

He had sat down on the railing of the porch. He leaned back against a pillar, turning a little away from them as he said with a laugh not free of bitterness: "I don't believe I quite get this idea about society."

Abruptly he turned back to Mrs. Lawrence. "What is it? A collection of individuals for mutual benefit and self-protection, I gather. Protection against what? Their own warmest selves? The most real things in them?"

Mrs. Lawrence colored, though she was smiling composedly enough. Edith was not smiling. He saw her anxious look over at her mother, as if expecting her to answer that, and yet--this was what her eyes made him think--secretly hoping she couldn't.

But Mrs. Lawrence maintained her manner of gracious, rather amused tolerance with an absurd hot-headedness, perversity, on his part. "Oh, come now, Deane," she laughed, "we're not going to get into an absurd discussion, are we?"

"I beg your pardon, Mrs. Lawrence," he retorted sharply, "but I don't think it an absurd discussion. I don't consider a thing that involves the happiness of as fine a human being as Ruth Holland an absurd thing to discuss!"

She laid down her work. "Ruth Holland," she began very quietly, "is a human being who selfishly--basely--took her own happiness, leaving misery for others. She outraged society as completely as a woman could outrage it. She was a thief, really,--stealing from the thing that was protecting her, taking all the privileges of a thing she was a traitor to. She was not only what we call a bad woman, she was a hypocrite. More than that, she was outrageously unfaithful to her dearest friend--to Edith here who loved and trusted her. Having no respect for marriage herself, she actually had the effrontery--to say nothing of the lack of fine feeling--to go to the altar with Edith the very night that she herself outraged marriage. I don't know, Deane, how a woman could do a worse thing than that. The most pernicious kind of woman is not the one who bears the marks of the bad woman upon her. It's the woman like Ruth Holland, who appears to be what she is not, who deceives, plays a false part. If you can't see that society must close in against a woman like that then all I can say, my dear Deane, is that you don't see very straight. You jeer about society, but society is nothing more than life as we have arranged it. It is an inst.i.tution. One living within it must keep the rules of that inst.i.tution. One who defies it--deceives it--must be shut out from it. So much we are forced to do in self-defence. We _owe_ that to the people who are trying to live decently, to be faithful. Life, as we have arranged it, must be based on confidence. We have to keep that confidence. We have to punish a violation of it." She took up her sewing again. "Your way of looking at it is not a very large way, Deane," she concluded pleasantly.

Edith had settled back in her chair--accepting, though her eyes were grieving. It was that combination which, perhaps even more than the words of her mother, made it impossible for him to hold back.

"Perhaps not," he said; "not what you would call a large way of looking at it. But do you know, Mrs. Lawrence, I'm not sure that I care for that large way of looking at it. I'm not sure that I care a great deal about an inst.i.tution that smothers the kindly things in people--as you are making this do in Edith. It sometimes occurs to me that life as we have arranged it is a rather unsatisfactory arrangement. I'm not sure that an arrangement of life which doesn't leave place for the most real things in life is going to continue forever. Ruth was driven into a corner and forced to do things she herself hated and suffered for--it was this same arrangement of life forced that on her, you know. You talk of marriage.

But you must know there was no real marriage between Marion Averley and Stuart Williams. And I don't believe you can deny that there is a real marriage between him and Ruth Holland." He had risen and now moved a little toward the steps. "So you see I don't believe I care much for your 'society,' Mrs. Lawrence," he laughed shortly. "This looks to me like a pretty clear case of life against society--and I see things just straight enough that life itself strikes me as rather more important than your precious 'arrangement' of it!"

That did not bring the color to Mrs. Lawrence's face; there seemed no color at all there when Deane finished speaking. She sat erect, her hands folded on her sewing, looking at him with strangely bright eyes.

When she spoke it was with a certain metallic pleasantness. "Why, very well, Deane," she said; "one is at perfect liberty to choose, isn't one?

And I think it quite right to declare one's self, as you have just done, that we may know who is of us and who is not." She smiled--a smile that seemed definitely to shut him out.

He looked at Edith; her eyes were down; he could see that her lips trembled. "Good-by," he said.

Mrs. Lawrence bowed slightly and took up her sewing.

"Good-by, Edith," he added gently.

She looked up at him and he saw then why she had been looking down.

"Good-by, Deane," she said a little huskily, her eyes all clouded with tears. "Though how absurd!" she quickly added with a rather tremulous laugh. "We shall be seeing you as usual, of course." But it was more appeal than declaration.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Ruth was different after her talk with Deane that night. Ted felt the change in her when he went up to say goodnight. The constraint between them seemed somehow to have fallen away. Ruth was natural now--just Ruth, he told himself, and felt that talking to Deane had done her good.