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<h2>CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE</h2> Her instinct to protect herself from this young girl was the thing that gained composure for her. At first it was simply one of those physical instincts that draw us back from danger, from pain; and then she threw the whole force of her will to keeping that semblance of composure. Her instinct was not to let reserves break down, not to show agitation; to protect herself by never leaving commonplace ground. It was terribly hard—this driving back the flood-tide of feeling and giving no sign of the struggle, the resentment. It was as if every nerve had been charged to full life and then left there outraged. But she could do it; she could appear pleasantly surprised at Mildred's having come to take her for a drive, could talk along about the little things that must be her shield against the big ones. Something in her had gone hard in that first moment of realizing who Mildred was. She was not going to be driven back again! And so she forced herself to talk pleasantly of the country through which they went, of Mildred's horse, of driving and riding. But it was impossible not to grow a little interested in this young Mildred Woodbury. She sat erect and drove in a manner that had the little tricks of worldliness, but was somehow charming in spite of its artificiality. Ruth was thinking that Mildred was a more sophisticated young person than she herself had been at that age. She wondered if sophistication was increasing in the world, if there was more of it in Freeport than there used to be. They talked of Ruth's father, of Mildred's people, of the neighborhood both knew so well. From that it drifted to the social life of the town. She was amused, rather sadly amused, at Mildred's air of superiority about it; it seemed so youthful, so facile. Listening to Mildred now pictures flashed before her: she and Edith Lawrence—girls of about fifteen—going over to the Woodburys' and eagerly asking, "Could we take the baby out, Mrs. Woodbury?" "Now you'll be very, very careful, girls?" Mrs. Woodbury would say, wrapping Mildred all up in soft pink things. "Oh, yes, Mrs. Woodbury," they would reply, a little shocked that she could entertain the thought of their not being careful. And then they would start off cooing girlish things about the cunning little darling. This was that baby—in spite of her determination to hold aloof from Mildred there was no banishing it; no banishing the apprehension that grew with the girl's talk. For Mildred seemed so much a part of the very thing for which she had this easy scorn. Something in the way she held the lines made it seem she would not belong anywhere else. She looked so carefully prepared for the very life for which she expressed disdain. She tried to forget the things that were coming back to her—how Mildred would gleefully hold up her hands to have her mittens put on when she and Edith were about to take her out, and tried too to turn the conversation—breaking out with something about Mrs. Herman's children. But it became apparent that Mildred was not to be put off. Everything Ruth would call up to hold her off she somehow forced around to an approach for what she wanted to say. And then it came abruptly, as if she were tired of trying to lead up to it. "I've been wanting to see you—Ruth," she hesitated over the name, but brought it out bravely, and it occurred to Ruth then that Mildred had not known how to address her. "When I heard you were here," she added, "I was determined you shouldn't get away without my seeing you." Ruth looked at her with a little smile, moved, in spite of herself, by the impetuousness of the girl's tone, by something real that broke through the worldly little manner. "I don't feel as the rest of them do." She flushed and said it hurriedly, a little tremulously; and yet there was something direct and honest in her eyes, as if she were going to say it whether it seemed nice taste or not. It reached Ruth, went through her self-protective determination not to be reached. Her heart went out to Mildred's youth, to this appeal from youth, moved by the freshness and realness beneath that surface artificiality, saddened by this defiance of one who, it seemed, could so little understand how big was the thing she defied, who seemed so much the product of the thing she scorned, so dependent on what she was apparently in the mood to flout. "I don't know that they are to be blamed for their feeling, Mildred," she answered quietly. "Oh, yes, they are!" hotly contended the girl. "It's because they don't understand. It's because they can't understand!" The reins had fallen loose in her hand; the whip sagged; she drooped—that stiff, chic little manner gone. She turned a timid, trusting face to Ruth—a light shining through troubled eyes. "It's love that counts, isn't it,—Ruth?" she asked, half humble, half defiant. It swept Ruth's heart of everything but sympathy. Her hand closed over Mildred's. "What is it, dear?" she asked. "Just what is it?" Mildred's eyes filled. Ruth could understand that so well—what sympathy meant to a feeling shut in, a feeling the whole world seemed against. "It's with me—as it was with you," the girl answered very low and simply. "It's—like that." Ruth shut her eyes for an instant; they were passing something fragrant; it came to her—an old fragrance—like something out of things past; a robin was singing; she opened her eyes and looked at Mildred, saw the sunshine finding gold in the girl's hair. The sadness of it—of youth and suffering, of pain in a world of beauty, that reach of pain into youth, into love, made it hard to speak. "I'm sorry, dear," was all she could say. They rode a little way in silence; Ruth did not know how to speak, what to say; and then Mildred began to talk, finding relief in saying things long held in. Ruth understood that so well. Oh, she understood it all so well—the whole tumult of it, the confused thinking, the joy, the passion,—the passion that would sacrifice anything, that would let the whole world go. Here it was again. She knew just what it was. "So you can see," Mildred was saying, "what you have meant to me." Yes, she could see that. They were driving along the crest of the hills back of the town. Mildred pointed to it. "That town isn't the whole of the world!" she exclaimed passionately, after speaking of the feeling that was beginning to form there against herself. "What do I care?" she demanded defiantly. "It's not the whole of the world!" Ruth looked at it. She could see the Lawrence house—it had a high place and was visible from all around; Mildred's home was not far from there; her own old home was only a block farther on. She had another one of those flashing pictures from things far back: Mrs. Woodbury—Mildred's mother—standing at the door with a bowl of chicken broth for Mrs. Holland—Ruth's mother—who was ill. "I thought maybe this would taste good," she could hear Mrs. Woodbury saying. Strange how things one had forgotten came back. Other things came back as for a moment she continued to look at the town where both she and Mildred had been brought up, where their ties were. Then she turned back to Mildred, to this other girl who, claimed by passionate love, was in the mood to let it all go. "But that's just what it is, Mildred," she said. "The trouble is, it is the whole of the world." "It's the whole of the social world," she answered the look of surprise. "It's just the same everywhere. And it's astonishing how united the world is. You give it up in one place—you've about given it up for every place." "Then the whole social world's not worth it!" broke from Mildred. "It's not worth—enough." Ruth found it hard to speak; she did not know what to say. She had a flashing sense of the haphazardness of life, of the power, the flame this found in Mildred that the usual experiences would never have found, of how, without it, she would doubtless have developed much like the other girls of her world—how she might develop because of it—how human beings were shaped by chance. She looked at Mildred's face—troubled, passionate, a confused defiance, and yet something real there looking through the tumult, something flaming, something that would fight, a something, she secretly knew, more flaming, more fighting, than might ever break to life in Mildred again. And then she happened to look down at the girl's feet—the very smart low shoes of dull kid, perfectly fitted, high arched—the silk stockings, the slender ankle. They seemed so definitely feet for the places prepared, for the easier ways, not fitted for going a hard way alone. It made her feel like a mother who would want to keep a child from a way she herself knew as too hard. "But what are you going to put in the place of that social world, Mildred?" she gently asked. "There must be something to fill its place. What is that going to be?" "Love will fill its place!" came youth's proud, sure answer. Ruth was looking straight ahead; the girl's tone had thrilled her—that faith in love, that courage for it. It was so youthful!—so youthfully sure, so triumphant in blindness. Youth would dare so much—youth knew so little. She did not say anything; she could not bear to. "Love can fill its place!" Mildred said again, as if challenging that silence. And as still Ruth did not speak she demanded, sharply, "Can't it?" Ruth turned to her a tender, compassionate face, too full of feeling, of conflict, to speak. Slowly, as if she could not bear to do it, she shook her head. Mildred looked just dazed for a moment, then so much as if one in whom she had trusted, on whom she had counted for a great deal had failed her that Ruth made a little gesture as if to say it was not that, as if to say she was sorry it seemed like that. Mildred did not heed it. "But it has with you," she insisted. "It has not!" leaped out the low, savage answer that startled the woman from whom it came. "It has not!" she repeated fiercely. Her rage was against the feeling that seemed to trick one like that; the way love got one—made one believe that nothing else in the world mattered but just itself. It wasn't fair! It was cruel! That made her savage—savage for telling Mildred the other side of it, the side love blinded her too. In that moment it seemed that love was a trap; it took hold of one and persuaded one things were true that weren't true! Just then it seemed a horrible thing the way love got one through lovely things, through beauty and tenderness, through the sweetest things—then did as it pleased with the life it had stolen in upon. Fiercely she turned the other face, told Mildred what love in loneliness meant, what it meant to be shut away from one's own kind, what that hurting of other lives did to one's self, what isolation made of one, what it did to love. Things leaped out that she had never faced, had never admitted for true; the girl to whom she talked was frightened and she was frightened herself—at what she told of what she herself had felt, feeling that she had never admitted she had had. She let the light in on things kept in the dark even in her own soul—a cruel light, a light that spared nothing, that seemed to find a savage delight in exposing the things deepest concealed. She would show the other side of it! There was a certain gloating in doing it—getting ahead of a thing that would trick one. And then that spent itself as passion will and she grew quieter and talked in a simple way of what loneliness meant, of what longing for home meant, of what it meant to know one had hurt those who had always been good to one, who loved and trusted. She spoke of her mother—of her father, and then she broke down and cried and Mildred listened in silence to those only half-smothered sobs. When Ruth was able to stop she looked up, timidly, at Mildred. Something seemed to have gone out of the girl—something youthful and superior, something radiant and assured. She looked crumpled up. The utter misery in her eyes, about her mouth, made Ruth whisper: "I'm sorry, Mildred." Mildred looked at her with a bitter little laugh and then turned quickly away. Ruth had never felt more wretched in her life than when, without Mildred having said a word, they turned in the gate leading up to Annie's. She wanted to say something to comfort. She cast around for something. "Maybe," she began, "that it will come right—anyway." Again Mildred only laughed in that hard little way. When they were half way up the hill Mildred spoke, as if, in miserable uncertainty, thinking things aloud. "Mrs. Blair has asked me to go to Europe with her for the summer," she said, in a voice that seemed to have no spring left in it. "She's chaperoning a couple of girls. I could go with them." "Oh, do, Mildred!" cried Ruth. "Do that!" It seemed to her wonderfully tender, wonderfully wise, of Edith. She was all eagerness to induce Mildred to go with Edith. But there was no answering enthusiasm. Mildred drooped. She did not look at Ruth. "I could do that," she said in a lifeless way, as if it didn't matter much what she did. When they said good-by Mildred's broken smile made Ruth turn hastily away. But she looked back after the girl had driven off, wanting to see if she was sitting up in that sophisticated little way she had. But Mildred was no longer sitting that way. She sagged, as if she did not care anything about how she sat. Ruth stood looking after her, watching as far as she could see her, longing to see her sit up, to see her hold the whip again in that stiff, chic little fashion. But she did not do it; her horse was going along as if he knew there was no interest in him. Ruth could not bear it. If only the whip would go up at just that right little angle! But it did not. She could not see the whip at all—only the girl's drooping back. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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