nd smiled too; and then, when the
man had jumped in the wagon and just as the horse was starting, the
woman called: "It seems awful good to have you back on these streets,
Ruth!"

Ruth could only nod in reply and hurried on; her heart beat fast; her
eyes were blurring. "It seems awful good to have you back on these
streets, Ruth!" Was _that_ what she had said? She turned around, wanting
to run after that wagon, not wanting to lose that pinched, shabby, eager
little woman who was glad to have her back on those streets. But the
wagon had turned a corner and was out of sight. Back on those streets!
It opened her to the fact that she was back on them. She walked more
slowly, thinking about that. And she could walk more slowly; she was
less driven.

After a block of perplexed thinking she knew who that woman was; it
flashed from her memory where she had known that intent look, that
wistful intentness lighting a thin little face. It was Annie Morris, a
girl in her class at the high-school, a plain, quiet girl--poor she
believed she was, not in Ruth's crowd. Now that she searched back for
what she remembered about it she believed that this Annie Morris had
always liked her; and perhaps she had taken more notice of her than
Edith and the other girls had. She could see her now getting out of the
shabby buggy in which she drove in to school--she lived somewhere out in
the country. She remembered talking to her sometimes at recess--partly
because she seemed a good deal alone and partly because she liked to
talk to her. She remembered that she was what they called awfully bright
in her classes.

That this girl, whom she had forgotten, should welcome her so warmly
stirred an old wondering: a wondering if somewhere in the world there
were not people who would be her friends. That wondering, longing, had
run through many lonely days. The people she had known would no longer
be her friends. But were there not other people? She knew so little
about the world outside her own life; her own life had seemed to shut
down around her. But she had a feeling that surely somewhere--somewhere
outside the things she had known--were people among whom she could find
friends. So far she had not found them. At the first, seeing how hard it
would be, how bad for them both, to have only each other, she had tried
to go out to people just as if there were nothing in her life to keep
her back from them. And then they would "hear"; that hearing would come