Quickly she looked up; her mouth, which had been so complacent,
twitched. He started toward her, but just then the doorbell rang. "I
presume that's your mother," she said, in matter of fact tone.

Mrs. Franklin was with them for dinner that night. Amy's social training
made it appear as if nothing were disturbing her. She appeared wholly
composed, serene; it was Deane who seemed ill at ease, out of sorts.

After dinner he had to go to the hospital and when she was alone with
his mother Amy was not able to keep away from the subject of Ruth
Holland. For one thing, she wanted to hear about her, she was avid for
detail as to how she looked, things she had done and said--that curious
human desire to press on a place that hurts. And there was too the
impulse for further self-exoneration, to be assured that she was right,
to feel that she was injured.

All of those things it was easy to get from Mrs. Franklin. Amy, not
willing to reveal what there had been between her and Deane, and having
that instinct for drawing sympathy to herself by seeming
self-depreciation, spoke gently of how she feared she did not altogether
understand about Deane's friend Ruth Holland. Was she wrong in not going
with Deane to see her?

Mrs. Franklin's explosion of indignation at the idea, and the feeling
with which, during the hour that followed, she expressed herself about
Deane's friend Ruth Holland, acted in a double fashion as both
fortification and new hurt. Mrs. Franklin, leader in church and
philanthropic affairs, had absolutely no understanding of things which
went outside the domain of what things should be. The poor and the
wicked did terrible things that society must do something about. There
was no excuse whatever for people who ought to know better. That people
should be dominated by things they ought not to feel was perversity on
their part and the most wilful kind of wickedness. She had Mrs.
Lawrence's point of view, but from a more provincial angle. Deane did
not get his questioning spirit, what she called his stubbornness, from
his mother.

Added to what she as a church woman and worker for social betterment
felt about the affair was the resentment of the mother at her son's
having been, as she put it, dragged into the outrage. She grew so
inflamed in talking of how this woman had used Deane that she did not
take thought of how she was giving more of an impression of her power
over him than might be pleasant hearing for Dean