out her and Ruth Holland and
her husband. _Her_ husband, she thought insistently, but without getting
the accustomed satisfaction from the thought. Miserably she wondered
just what they were saying; she flinched in the thought of their talk
about her hurt, her loneliness. And then she felt a little as if she
could cry. She had wondered if she had anybody's real pity.

That thought of their talking of it opened it to her, drew her to it.
She thought of Ruth Holland, gave up the worn pretense of disinterest
and let herself go in thinking of her.

The first feeling she had had when she suspected that her husband was
drawn to that girl, Ruth Holland, was one of chagrin, a further hurt to
pride. For her power to give pain would be cut off. Once she saw the
girl's face light as Stuart went up to her for a dance. She knew then
that the man who had that girl's love could not be hurt in the way she
had been hurting. At first she was not so much jealous as strangely
desolated. And then as time went on and in those little ways that can
make things known to those made acute through unhappiness she came to
know that her husband cared for this girl and had her love, anger at
having been again stripped, again left there outraged, made her seize
upon the only power left, that more sordid, more commonplace kind of
power. She could no longer hurt by withholding herself; she could only
hurt by standing in the way. Rage at the humiliation of being reduced to
that fastened her to it with a hold not to be let go. All else was taken
from her and she was left with just that. Somehow she reduced herself to
it; she became of the quality of it.

Pride, or rather self-valuation, incapacity for self-depreciation, had
never let her be honest with herself. As there were barriers shutting
the world out from her hurt and humiliation, so too were there barriers
shutting herself out. She did not acknowledge pain, loneliness, for that
meant admission that she could not have what she would have. She thought
of it as withdrawal, dignified withdrawal from one not fit. She had
always tried to feel that her only humiliation was in having given to
one not worth her--one lesser.

But in this reckless and curiously exciting mood of honesty tonight she
got some idea of how great the real hurt had been. She knew now that
when she came to know--to feel in a way that was knowing--that her
husband loved Ruth Holland she suffered something much more than hurt to
pr