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<h2>CHAPTER TWO</h2> He had known that Amy would ask, and wondered a little at her waiting so long. It was an hour later, as she sat before her dressing-table brushing her hair that she turned to him with a little laugh and asked: "Who is this mysterious Ruth?" He sighed; he was tired and telling about Ruth seemed a large undertaking. Amy colored and turned from him and picked up her brush. "Don't tell me if you don't want to," she said formally. His hand went round her bared shoulder. "Dearest! Why, I want to, of course. It's just that it's a long story, and tonight I'm a little tired." As she did not respond to that he added: "This was a hard day at the office." Amy went on brushing her hair; she did not suggest that he let it go until another time so he began, "Ruth was a girl who used to live here." "I gathered that," she replied quietly. Her tone made no opening for him. "I thought a great deal of her," he said after a moment. "Yes, I gathered that too." She said it dryly, and smiled just a little. He was more conscious than ever of being tired, of its being hard to tell about Ruth. "I gathered," said Amy, still faintly smiling, though, her voice went a trifle higher, "that you thought more of her—" she hesitated, then amended—"think more of her—than the rest of them do." He answered simply: "Yes, I believe that's so. Though Edith used to care a great deal for Ruth," he added meditatively. "Well, what did she do?" Amy demanded impatiently. "What is it?" For a moment his cheek went down to her soft hair that was all around her, in a surge of love for its softness, a swift, deep gratitude for her loveliness. He wanted to rest there, letting that, for the time, shut out all else, secure in new happiness and forgetting old hurts. But he felt her waiting for what she wanted to know and so with an effort he began: "Why, you see, dear, Ruth—it was pretty tough for Ruth. Things didn't go right for her—not as they did for Cora and Edith and the girls of her crowd. She—" Something in the calm of Amy's waiting made it curiously hard to say, "Ruth couldn't marry the man she cared for." "Why not!" she asked dispassionately. "Why, because it wasn't possible," he answered a little sharply. "She couldn't marry him because he wasn't divorced," he said bluntly then. Amy's deep gray eyes, they had seemed so unperturbed, so unsympathetically calm, were upon him now in a queer, steady way. He felt himself flushing. "Wasn't divorced?" she said with a little laugh. "Is that a way of saying he was married?" He nodded. "She cared for a man who was married to someone else?" she asked with rising voice. Again he only nodded, feeling incapable, when Amy looked at him like that, of saying the things he would like to be saying for Ruth. Abruptly she drew her hair away. "And you can sympathize with—like—a person who would do that?" "I certainly both sympathize with and like Ruth." That had come quick and sharp, and then suddenly he felt it all wrong that a thing which had gone so deep into his own life should be coming to Amy like this, that she should be taking the attitude of the town against his friend, against his own feeling. He blamed his way of putting it, telling himself it was absurd to expect her to understand a bald statement like that. At that moment he realized it was very important she should understand; not only Ruth, but something in himself—something counting for much in himself would be shut out if she did not understand. It made his voice gentle as he began: "Amy, don't you know that just to be told of a thing may make it seem very different from what the thing really was? Seeing a thing from the outside is so different from living through it. Won't you reserve judgment about Ruth—she is my friend and I hate to see her unfairly judged—until some time when I can tell it better?" "Why have you so much to do with it? Why is it so important I do not—judge her?" Amy's sweetness, that soft quality that had been dear to him seemed to have tightened into a hard shrewdness as she asked: "How did you happen to know it all from within?" He pushed his chair back from her and settled into it wearily. "Why, because she was my friend, dear. I was in her confidence." "I don't think I'd be very proud of being in the confidence of a woman who ran away with another woman's husband!" Her hostile voice fanned the old anger that had so many times flamed when people were speaking hostilely of Ruth. But he managed to say quietly: "But you see you don't know much about it yet, Amy." He was facing her mirror and what he saw in it made him lean forward, his arms about her, with an impulsive: "Sweetheart, we're not going to quarrel, are we?" But after his kisses she asked, as if she had only been biding her time through the interruption; "Did she run away with him?" His arm dropped from her shoulder. "They left together," he answered shortly. "Are they married now?" "No." Amy, who had resumed the brushing of her hair, held the brush suspended. "Living together—all this time—and not married?" "They are not married," was his heated response, "because the man's wife has not divorced him." He added, not without satisfaction: "She's that kind of a person." Amy turned and her eyes met his. "What kind of a person?" she said challengingly. "I presume," she added coolly, "that she does not believe in divorce." "I take it that she does not," was his dry answer. She flushed, and exclaimed a little tremulously: "Well, really, Deane, you needn't be so disagreeable about it!" Quickly he turned to her, glad to think that he had been disagreeable; that was so much easier than what he had been trying to keep from thinking. "I didn't mean to be disagreeable, Amy dear. I suppose I've got in the habit of being disagreeable about Ruth: people here have been so hard about her; I've resented their attitude so." "But why should you care? Why is it such a personal matter to you?" He was about to say, "She was my friend," but remembering he had said that before, he had anew a sense of helplessness. He did not want to talk about it any more. He had become tired out with thinking about it, with the long grieving for Ruth and the sorrowing with her. When he found Amy their love had seemed to free him from old hurts and to bring him out from loneliness. Wonderful as the ecstasy of fresh love was he had thought even more of the exquisite peace that rests in love. Amy had seemed to be bringing him to that; and now it seemed that Ruth was still there holding him away from it. The thought brushed his mind, his face softening for the instant with it, that Ruth would be so sorry to have that true. Amy had braided her hair; the long fair braid hung over her shoulder, beautifully framing her face as she turned to him. "Had you supposed, when you all knew her, when she was in your crowd, that she was—that kind of a person?" His blood quickened in the old anger for Ruth; but there was something worse than that—a sick feeling, a feeling in which there was disappointment and into which there crept something that was like shame. The telephone rang before he need reply. When he turned from it, it was to say hurriedly, "I'll have to go to the hospital, Amy. Sorry—that woman I operated on yesterday—" He was in the next room, gathering together his things before he had finished it. Amy followed him in. "Why, I'm so sorry, dear. It's too bad—when you're so tired." He turned and caught her in his arms and held her there close in a passion of relief at the gentleness and love of her voice that swept away those things about her he had tried to think were not in his mind. Amy was so sweet!—so beautiful, so tender. Why of course she wouldn't understand about Ruth! How absurd to expect her to understand, he thought, when he had blurted things out like that, giving her no satisfaction about it. He was touchy on the subject, he gladly told himself, as he held her close in all the thankfulness of regaining her. And when, after he had kissed her good-by she lifted her face and kissed him again his rush of love for her had power to sweep all else away. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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