ay of trying to make things better. She had come in
kindness, and she had not been kindly received. It was in a different
voice that Ruth began: "Harriett, don't you see, when you come to look
at it, that I couldn't do this? Down in your heart--way down in your
heart, Harriett--don't you see that I couldn't? Don't you see that if I
left Stuart now to do the best he could by himself, left him, I mean,
for this reason--came creeping back myself into a little corner of
respectability--the crumbs that fall from the tables of
respectability--! You _know_, Harriett Holland," she flamed, "that if I
did that I'd be less a woman, not a better one?"

"I--I knew it would be hard," granted Harriett, unhappily. "Of
course--after such a long time together--But you're not married to him,
Ruth," she said again, wretchedly. "Why"--her voice fell almost to a
whisper--"you're living in--adultery."

"Well if I am," retorted Ruth--"forgive me for saying it, Harriett--that
adultery has given me more decent ideas of life than marriage seems to
have given you!"

Her feeling about it grew stronger as the day wore on. That evening she
got the Woodburys' on the telephone and asked for Mildred. She did not
know just what she would say, she had no plan, but she wanted to see
Mildred again. She was told, however, that Mildred had gone to Chicago
on a late afternoon train. At the last minute she had decided to go to
Europe with Mrs. Blair, the servant who was speaking said, and had gone
over to Chicago to see about clothes.

Ruth hung up the receiver and sat looking into the telephone. Then she
laughed. So Mildred had been "saved."

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

On the afternoon of her last day in Freeport Ruth took a long tramp with
Deane. She was going that night; she was all ready for leaving when
Deane came out and asked if he couldn't take her for a ride in his car.
She suggested a walk instead, wanting the tramp before the confinement
of travelling. So they cut through the fields back of Annie's and came
out on a road well known to them of old. They tramped along it a long
way, Ruth speaking of things she remembered, talking of old drives along
that road which had been a favorite with all of their old crowd. They
said things as they felt like it, but there was no constraint in their
silences. It had always been like that with her and Deane. Finally they
sat down on a knoll a little back from the road, overlooking pastures
and fields of b