house, each knowing that the other was thinking of those days.
Harriett could see Ruth as a little girl running through those rooms.
She remembered a certain little blue gingham dress--and Ruth's hair
braided down her back; pictures of Ruth with their grandfather, their
mother, their father--all those three gone now. She started to tell Ruth
what she had come to tell her, then changed it to something else, still
holding back, afraid of emotion, of breaking through, seeming powerless
and hating herself for being powerless. She would tell that a little
later--before she left. She would wait until Ted came in. She seized
upon that, it let her out--let her out from the thing she had been all
warm eagerness to do. To bridge that time she asked a few diffident
questions about the West; she really wanted very much to know how Ruth
lived, how she "managed." But she put the questions carefully, it would
seem reluctantly, just because almost everything seemed to lead to that
one thing,--the big thing that lay there between her and Ruth. It was
hard to ask questions about the house Ruth lived in and not let her mind
get swamped by that one terrible fact that she lived there with Stuart
Williams--another woman's husband.

Harriett's manner made Ruth bitter. It seemed Harriett was afraid to
talk to her, evidently afraid that at any moment she would come upon
something she did not want to come near. Harriett needn't be so
afraid!--she wasn't going to contaminate her.

And so the talk became a pretty miserable affair. It was a relief when
Flora Copeland came in the room. "There's someone here to see you,
Ruth," she said.

"Deane?" inquired Ruth.

"No, a woman."

"A woman?"--and then, at the note of astonishment in her own voice she
laughed in an embarrassed little way.

"Yes, a Mrs. Herman. She says you may remember her as Annie Morris. She
says she went to school with you."

"Yes," said Ruth, "I know." She was looking down, pulling at her
handkerchief. After an instant she looked up and said quietly: "Won't
you ask her to come in here?"

The woman who stood in the doorway a moment later gave the impression of
life, work, having squeezed her too hard. She had quick movements, as if
she were used to doing things in a hurry. She had on a cheap, plain
suit, evidently bought several years before. She was very thin, her face
almost pinched, but two very live eyes looked out from it. She appeared
embarrassed, but somehow the embar