augh.

"That's it," he said, "at a high moment, when what seems your life's
happiness is at stake, you are afraid of life in the same old way--afraid
of life and a healthy oath."

She was stung by his words into realization of the puerility of her act,
and yet she felt that he had magnified it unduly and was consequently
resentful. They sat in silence for a long time, she thinking desperately
and he pondering upon his love which had departed. He knew, now, that he
had not really loved her. It was an idealized Ruth he had loved, an
ethereal creature of his own creating, the bright and luminous spirit of
his love-poems. The real bourgeois Ruth, with all the bourgeois failings
and with the hopeless cramp of the bourgeois psychology in her mind, he
had never loved.

She suddenly began to speak.

"I know that much you have said is so. I have been afraid of life. I
did not love you well enough. I have learned to love better. I love you
for what you are, for what you were, for the ways even by which you have
become. I love you for the ways wherein you differ from what you call my
class, for your beliefs which I do not understand but which I know I can
come to understand. I shall devote myself to understanding them. And
even your smoking and your swearing--they are part of you and I will love
you for them, too. I can still learn. In the last ten minutes I have
learned much. That I have dared to come here is a token of what I have
already learned. Oh, Martin!--"

She was sobbing and nestling close against him.

For the first time his arms folded her gently and with sympathy, and she
acknowledged it with a happy movement and a brightening face.

"It is too late," he said. He remembered Lizzie's words. "I am a sick
man--oh, not my body. It is my soul, my brain. I seem to have lost all
values. I care for nothing. If you had been this way a few months ago,
it would have been different. It is too late, now."

"It is not too late," she cried. "I will show you. I will prove to you
that my love has grown, that it is greater to me than my class and all
that is dearest to me. All that is dearest to the bourgeoisie I will
flout. I am no longer afraid of life. I will leave my father and
mother, and let my name become a by-word with my friends. I will come to
you here and now, in free love if you will, and I will be proud and glad
to be with you. If I have been a traitor to love, I will now, for love's
s