may not come to nothing. What I've had--what I've
gone through--lives in me, Ted. It doesn't come to nothing if I--come to
something!" She stopped abruptly with a choking little laugh.

Ted looked at her wonderingly; but the hardness had gone out of his
look. "But what are you going to do, Ruth?" he asked gently.

"I don't know yet. I've got to find out."

"You must see that I can't help but worry about it," he went on. "Going
so far away--to a place absolutely unknown to you--where I'm afraid it
will be so much harder than you think."

She did not answer him, looking off to that eastern range she was going
to cross, as if the mountains could help her to hold on to her own
feeling against the doubts he was trying to throw around her.

"You see, Ruth," he went on, as if feeling his way, not wanting to hurt
her, "what has been may make it hard to go on. You can't tell. You'll
never know--never be sure. Old things may come up to spoil new ones for
you. That's what I'm so afraid of. That's what it seems you aren't
seeing. You would be so much--safer--to stay with Stuart."

She turned to him with a little laugh, her lashes wet. "Yes, Ted dear, I
suppose I would. But I never did seem to stay where I was safest--did
I?"

"Don't worry about me, Ted," she said just as they were coming into
town. "I'm going to take some of father's money--yes, yes, I know it
isn't a great deal, but enough for a little while, till I get my
bearings--and I'm going to make things come alive for me again. I'm not
through yet, that's all. I could have stayed with life gone dead; it
would have been safer, as you say. But you see I'm not through yet,
Ted--I guess that's the secret of it all. I want more life--more things
from life. And I'm going to New York just because it will be so
completely new--so completely beginning new--and because it's the center
of so many living things. And it's such a wonderful time, Ted. It seems
to me the war is going to make a new world--a whole new way of looking
at things. It's as if a lot of old things, old ideas, had been melted,
and were fluid now, and were to be shaped anew. That's the way it seems
to me, and that makes me the more eager to get some things from life
that I haven't had. I've been shut in with my own experience. If I
stayed on here I'd be shut in with my own dead experiences. I want to go
on! I can't stop here--that's all. And we have to find our way for going
on. We must find our own way, Ted