ste or not. It reached Ruth, went through her self-protective
determination not to be reached. Her heart went out to Mildred's youth,
to this appeal from youth, moved by the freshness and realness beneath
that surface artificiality, saddened by this defiance of one who, it
seemed, could so little understand how big was the thing she defied, who
seemed so much the product of the thing she scorned, so dependent on
what she was apparently in the mood to flout. "I don't know that they
are to be blamed for their feeling, Mildred," she answered quietly.

"Oh, yes, they are!" hotly contended the girl. "It's because they don't
understand. It's because they _can't_ understand!" The reins had fallen
loose in her hand; the whip sagged; she drooped--that stiff, chic little
manner gone. She turned a timid, trusting face to Ruth--a light shining
through troubled eyes. "It's love that counts, isn't it,--Ruth?" she
asked, half humble, half defiant.

It swept Ruth's heart of everything but sympathy. Her hand closed over
Mildred's. "What is it, dear?" she asked. "Just what is it?"

Mildred's eyes filled. Ruth could understand that so well--what sympathy
meant to a feeling shut in, a feeling the whole world seemed against.
"It's with me--as it was with you," the girl answered very low and
simply. "It's--like that."

Ruth shut her eyes for an instant; they were passing something fragrant;
it came to her--an old fragrance--like something out of things past; a
robin was singing; she opened her eyes and looked at Mildred, saw the
sunshine finding gold in the girl's hair. The sadness of it--of youth
and suffering, of pain in a world of beauty, that reach of pain into
youth, into love, made it hard to speak. "I'm sorry, dear," was all she
could say.

They rode a little way in silence; Ruth did not know how to speak, what
to say; and then Mildred began to talk, finding relief in saying things
long held in. Ruth understood that so well. Oh, she understood it all so
well--the whole tumult of it, the confused thinking, the joy, the
passion,--the passion that would sacrifice anything, that would let the
whole world go. Here it was again. She knew just what it was.

"So you can see," Mildred was saying, "what you have meant to me."

Yes, she could see that.

They were driving along the crest of the hills back of the town. Mildred
pointed to it. "That town isn't the whole of the world!" she exclaimed
passionately, after speaking of the feeling