ould
have been much pleased. In that worn way, she was pleased now; doubtless
it had been hard for Harriett to come--so busy, and not well. Perhaps
her coming meant real defiance. Anyway, it was good of her to come. She
tried to be nice to Harriett, to talk about things as if she liked
having her there to talk with. But that final picture of Mildred's
drooping back was right there before her all the time. As she talked
with Harriett about the price of butter and eggs--the living to be had
in selling them, she was all the while seeing Mildred--Mildred as she
had been when Ruth got into the buggy; as she said, "Love can take its
place!"--as she was when she drove away. She had a sick feeling of
having failed; she had failed the very thing in Mildred to which she had
elected to be faithful in herself. And _why_? What right had one to say
that another was not strong enough? How did one _know_? And yet she
wanted Mildred to go with Edith; she believed that she would--now. That
blighting sense of failure, of having been unfaithful, could not kill a
feeling of relief. Did it mean that she was, after all, just like Edith?
Had her venturing, her experience, left her much as she would have been
without it? Just before meeting Mildred she was strong in the feeling of
having gained something from the hard way she had gone alone. She was
going on! That was what it had shown her--that one was to go on. Then
she had to listen to Mildred--and she was back with the very people she
had felt she was going on past--one with those people she had so
triumphantly decided were not worth her grieving for them.

She had been so sure--so radiantly sure, happy in that sense of having,
at last, found herself, of being rid of fears and griefs and
incertitudes. Then she met Mildred. It came to her then--right while she
was talking with Harriett about what Flora Copeland was going to do now
that the house would be broken up--that it was just that thing which
kept the world conservative. It was fear for others. It was that feeling
she had when she looked down at Mildred's feet.

One did not have that feeling when one looked at one's own feet. Fear of
pain for others was quite unlike fear for one's self. Courage for one's
self one could gain; in the fires of the heart that courage was forged.
When the heart was warm with the thing one wanted to do one said no
price in pain could be too great. But courage for others had to be
called from the mind. It wa