at had been thrown wide open when she left Annie's home in Freeport
the spring before.

She had tried to write to Deane. She felt that she should write to him,
but she had a feeling of powerlessness. Finally, only a little while
before, she had brought herself to do it. She knew it was a poor letter,
a halting, constrained thing, but it seemed the best she could do, and
so finally, after a great deal of uncertainty, she sent it.

His reply made her feel that he realized how it had been, why she had
been so long in writing, why the letter had been the stilted thing it
was. It gave her a feeling that her friend had not withdrawn from her
because of what she had brought down upon him, that that open channel
between him and her was there as it had ever been. And though his letter
did not make her happy, it loosened something in her to be able to feel
that the way between her and Deane was not closed.

"Don't distress yourself, Ruth," she now reread, "or have it upon your
spirit, where too much has lain heavy all these years. You want to know
the truth, and the truth is that Amy did resent my feeling about
you--about you and your situation--and that put us apart. But you see it
was not in us to stay together, or we could not have been thus put
apart. Love can't do it all, Ruth--not for long; I mean love that hasn't
roots down in the spirit can't. And where there isn't that spiritual
underneath, without a hinterland, love is pretty insecure.

"I could have held on to it a while longer, I suppose, by cutting clear
loose from the thing really me. And I suppose I would have done it if I
could--I did in fact make attempts at it--but that me-ness, I'm afraid,
is most infernal strong in my miserable make-up. And somehow the
withdrawal of one's self seems a lot to pay for even the happiness of
love. There are some of us can't seem able to do it.

"So it's not you, Ruth; it's that it was like that, and that it came out
through the controversy about you. Cast from your mind any feeling
adding the wrecking of my happiness to your list of crimes.

"But, Ruth, I'm _not_ happy. I couldn't get along in happiness, and I
don't get along without it. It's a paralyzing thing not to have
happiness--or to lose it, rather. Does it ever seem to you that life is
a pretty paralyzing thing? That little by little--a little here and a
little there--it _gets_ us? We get harness-broke, you see. Seems to have
gone that way with most of the people I kn