that was beginning to form
there against herself. "What do I care?" she demanded defiantly. "It's
not the whole of the world!"

Ruth looked at it. She could see the Lawrence house--it had a high place
and was visible from all around; Mildred's home was not far from there;
her own old home was only a block farther on. She had another one of
those flashing pictures from things far back: Mrs. Woodbury--Mildred's
mother--standing at the door with a bowl of chicken broth for Mrs.
Holland--Ruth's mother--who was ill. "I thought maybe this would taste
good," she could hear Mrs. Woodbury saying. Strange how things one had
forgotten came back. Other things came back as for a moment she
continued to look at the town where both she and Mildred had been
brought up, where their ties were. Then she turned back to Mildred, to
this other girl who, claimed by passionate love, was in the mood to let
it all go. "But that's just what it is, Mildred," she said. "The trouble
is, it _is_ the whole of the world."

"It's the whole of the social world," she answered the look of surprise.
"It's just the same everywhere. And it's astonishing how united the
world is. You give it up in one place--you've about given it up for
every place."

"Then the whole social world's not worth it!" broke from Mildred. "It's
not worth--enough."

Ruth found it hard to speak; she did not know what to say. She had a
flashing sense of the haphazardness of life, of the power, the flame
this found in Mildred that the usual experiences would never have found,
of how, without it, she would doubtless have developed much like the
other girls of her world--how she might develop because of it--how human
beings were shaped by chance. She looked at Mildred's face--troubled,
passionate, a confused defiance, and yet something real there looking
through the tumult, something flaming, something that would fight, a
something, she secretly knew, more flaming, more fighting, than might
ever break to life in Mildred again. And then she happened to look down
at the girl's feet--the very smart low shoes of dull kid, perfectly
fitted, high arched--the silk stockings, the slender ankle. They seemed
so definitely feet for the places prepared, for the easier ways, not
fitted for going a hard way alone. It made her feel like a mother who
would want to keep a child from a way she herself knew as too hard.

"But what are you going to put in the place of that social world,
Mildred?" she g