any minute now, but, much as she wanted to tell it,
she shrank from doing so. It seemed that telling that would open
everything up--and they had opened nothing up. Harriett had grown into a
way of shrinking back from the things she really wanted to do, was
unpracticed in doing what she felt like doing.

Acting upon an impulse, she had started for Ruth. There had been a
moment of real defiance when she told Mamie to tell Mr. Tyler that she
had gone to see her sister. She had a right to go and see her sister! No
one should keep her from it. Her heart was stirred by what her father
had done about Ruth. It made her know that she too felt more than she
had shown. His having done that made her want to do something. It moved
her to have this manifestation of a softening she had not suspected. It
reached something in her, something that made her feel a little more
free, more bold, more loving. His defiance, for she felt that in it too,
struck a spark in her. She even had a secret satisfaction in the
discomfiture she knew this revelation of her father's--what they would
call weakening--caused her husband and her brother. Unacknowledged
dissatisfactions of her own sharpened her feeling about it. She had not
looked at either her husband or Cyrus when the announcement was made,
but beneath her own emotion was a secret, unacknowledged gloating at
what she knew was their displeasure, at their helplessness to resent.
Ted was a dear boy! Ted's shining eyes somehow made her know just how
glad she herself was.

So she had hurried along, stirred, eager to tell Ruth. But once with her
she held back from telling her, grew absurdly timid about it. It seemed
so much else might come when that came--things long held back, things
hard to let one's self talk about.

And then Ruth was so strange tonight. After that first day it had been
easy to talk with Ruth; that first embarrassment over, she had seemed
simple and natural and Harriett could talk with her about the little
things that came up and at times just forget the big thing that held
them apart. After that first meeting she had felt much more comfortable
with Ruth than she would have supposed the terrible circumstances would
let her feel. But tonight Ruth was different, constrained, timid; she
seemed holding herself back, as if afraid of something. It made Harriett
conscious of what there was holding them apart. She did not know how to
begin what she had been so eager to tell.

And so