n that; it was
merely that she let him see. He knew now that there was some big thing
in her life he had known nothing about; that he had not understood Ruth,
though he had known her through all the years and had thought he knew
her so well. He was bewildered, his pain was blunted in that
bewilderment. There was a sick sense of life as all different, but he
was too dazed then for the pain that came later with definite knowing.
He went home that night and because he could not sleep tried to read a
medical book; usually that took all his mind, for the time other things
would not exist for him. But that was not true tonight; that world of
facts could not get him; he lived right on in the world of his own
feeling. He was not to have Ruth; he did not seem able to get a real
sense of that either, there was just a sick feeling about it rather than
actual realization, acceptance. And what did it mean? Surely he knew
Ruth's life, the people she went with; it was always he, when he was at
home, Ruth went about with. Someone away from home? But she had been
very little away from home. Who could it be? He went over and over that.
It came to seem unreal; as if there were some misunderstanding, some
mistake. And yet, that look.... His own disappointment was at times
caught up into his marvel at her; that moment's revelation of what her
caring could be was so wonderful as to bear him out of the fact that it
was not for him she cared. That was the way it was all through, his love
for her deepening with his marvel at her, the revelation of what she
felt for another man claiming more and more of himself for her. It was a
thing he would have scoffed at if told of, it was a thing he could not
somehow justify even to himself, but it was true that the more he saw of
what love meant to Ruth the more Ruth came to mean to him.

In those next few months, the months before he actually knew, there were
times when he could almost persuade himself that there was something
unreal about it all, torturous wonderings as to who the man could be
trailing off into the possibility of there being no man, because he knew
of none; sometimes he tried to persuade himself that this passionate
feeling he had glimpsed in Ruth was a thing apart from any particular
man--for who _was_ the man? Sometimes he could, for a moment, let in the
hope that since she could care like that she would care for him. Though
he more than half knew he deluded himself in that; there was,