r. He would arrive at a
conclusion in which he felt considerable satisfaction only to steal
another look at her and find that she did not look at all like the woman
he had made up his mind she was. What held him was the way feeling
shaped her. She had a delicate, sweet face, but there were times when it
was almost repellent in its somberness, when it hardened in a way that
puzzled him. She would sit looking from the window and it was as if a
dense sadness had settled down upon her; then her face would light with
a certain sad tenderness, and once he had the fancy of her lifting her
head out of gloom to listen to a beautiful, far-away call. There were
long meditations, far steady looks out at something, little reminiscent
smiles that lingered about her sensitive mouth after her eyes had gone
sad again. She would grow tired of thinking and close her eyes and seem
to try to rest. Her face, at those times, showed the wear of hard years,
laying bare lines that one took no count of when her eyes were lighted
and her mouth sensitive. Frequently she would turn from herself and
smile at the baby across the aisle; but once, when the baby was crowing
and laughing she abruptly turned away. He tried to construct "a life"
for her, but she did not stay in any life he carefully arranged. There
were times when he impatiently wondered why he should be wondering so
much about her; those were the times when she seemed to have let it all
go, was inert. But though he did not succeed in getting a "life" for
her, she gave him a freshened sense of life as immensely interesting, as
charged with pain and sweetness.

It was over the pain and the sweetness of life that this woman--Ruth
Holland--brooded during the two days that carried her back to the home
of her girlhood. She seemed to be going back over a long bridge. That
part of her life had been cut away from her. With most lives the past
grew into the future; it was as a growth that spread, the present but
the extent of the growth at the moment. With her there had been the
sharp cut; not a cut, but a tear, a tear that left bleeding ends. Back
there lay the past, a separated thing. During the eleven years since her
life had been torn from that past she had seen it not only as a separate
thing but a thing that had no reach into the future. The very number of
miles between, the fact that she made no journeys back home, contributed
to that sense of the cleavage, the remoteness, the finality. Those