quickly cleared as he held
out his hand and he smiled at her with a sudden boyish warmth that made
her face--it was thin, tired--also light with pleasure. He kept shaking
her hand; it seemed wonderfully good of her to have come along just
then--she was something friendly in a hostile world. He went out
eagerly, gratefully, to the something friendly. He had had about all he
could stand of the other things, other feelings. He had told Ruth that
he would be sure to go and see Mrs. Herman. He got in with her now and
they talked of Ruth as they jogged through the country which he now
noticed was aflame with the red and gold of October.

He found himself chatting along about Ruth just as if there was not this
other thing about her--the thing that made it impossible to speak of her
to almost anyone else in the town. It helped a lot to talk of Ruth that
way just then. He had seemed all clogged up with hatred and resentment,
fury at the town made him want to do something to somebody, and pity for
Ruth made him feel sick in his sense of helplessness. Now those ugly
things, those choking, blinding things fell away in his talking about
Ruth to this woman who wanted to hear about her because she cared for
her, who wanted to hear the simple little things about her that those
other people had no interest in. He found himself chatting along about
Ruth and Stuart--their house, their land, the field of peas into which
they turned their sheep, the potatoes grown on their place that summer.
He talked of artesian wells and irrigation, of riding western horses and
of camping in the mountains. Thinking of it afterwards he didn't know
when he had talked so much. And of course, as everyone was doing those
days, they talked about the war. She was fairly aflame with feeling
about it.

He rode all the way home with Mrs. Herman, stayed for lunch and then
lingered about the place for an hour or more after that. He felt more
like himself than he had at any time since coming home; he could forget
a little about that desolate house that was no longer to be his home,
and the simple friendly interest of this woman who was Ruth's friend
helped to heal a very sore place in his heart.

But afterwards, back there at home where it was as if he was stripping
dead years, what came over him was the feeling that things were not as
they had seemed out there with Mrs. Herman. She was like that, but in
being that way she was different from the whole world, at leas