w she was somebody," he laughed. "And I guess Deane thinks she _is_,"
he added with another laugh. "Guess he decided that first time he met
her. You know he stopped in Indianapolis to see a classmate who was
practising there--met her at a party, I believe, and--good-by Deane! But
somehow she isn't what you'd expect Deane's wife to be," he went on more
seriously. "Doesn't look that way, anyhow. Looks pretty frigid, I
thought, and, oh--fixed up. As if she wasn't just real."

Ruth's brows puckered. If there was one thing it seemed the wife of
Deane Franklin should be, it was real. But doubtless Ted was wrong--not
knowing her. It did not seem that Deane would be drawn to anyone who was
not real.

She lingered in the thought of him. Real was just what Deane was. He had
been wonderfully real with her in those days--days that had made the
pattern of her life. Reality had swept away all other things between
them. That carried her back to the new thinking, the questions. It
seemed it was the things not real that were holding people apart. It was
the artificialities people had let living build up around them made
those people hard. People would be simpler--kinder--could those unreal
things be swept away. She dwelt on the thought of a world like that--a
world of people simple and real as Deane Franklin was simple and real.

She was called from that by a movement and exclamation from Ted, who had
leaned over the railing. "There goes Mildred Woodbury," he said,--"and
alone."

His tone made her look at him in inquiry and then down the street at the
slight figure of a girl whose light dress stood out clearly between the
shadows. Mildred was the daughter of a family who lived in the next
block. The Woodburys and the Hollands had been neighbors and friends as
far back as Ruth could remember. Mildred was only a little girl when
Ruth went away--such a pretty little girl, her fair hair always gayly
tied with ribbons. She had been there with her mother the night before
and Ruth had been startled by her coming into the room where she was and
saying impulsively: "You don't remember me, do you? I'm Mildred--Mildred
Woodbury."

"And you used to call me Wuth!" Ruth had eagerly replied.

It had touched her, surrounded as she was by perfunctoriness and
embarrassment that this young girl should seek her out in that warm way.
And something in the girl's eyes had puzzled her. She had returned to
thought of it more than once and that made her pe