It was hard to get back into the easy current of everyday talk. Cora
Albright's question had too rudely pulled them out of it, disturbing the
quiet flow of inconsequential things. Even when they had recovered and
were safely flowing along on the fact that the new hotel was to cost two
hundred thousand dollars, after they had moved with apparent serenity to
lamentation over a neighbor who was sick in bed and without a cook, it
was as if they were making a display of the ease with which they could
move on those commonplace things, as if thus to deny the consciousness
of whirlpools near by.
So they seemed to Dr. Deane Franklin, who, secured by the shadow of the
porch vine, could smile to himself at the way he saw through them.
Though Deane Franklin's smile for seeing through people was not so much
a smile as a queer little twist of the left side of his face, a screwing
up of it that half shut one eye and pulled his mouth out of shape, the
same twist that used to make people call him a homely youngster. He was
thinking that Cora's question, or at any rate her manner in asking it,
would itself have told that she had lived away from Freeport for a
number of years. She did not know that they did not talk about Ruth
Holland any more, that certainly they did not speak of her in the tone
of everyday things.
And yet, looking at it in any but the Freeport way, it was the most
natural thing in the world that Cora should have asked what she did.
Mrs. Lawrence had asked if Mr. Holland--he was Ruth's father--was
getting any better, and then Cora had turned to him with the inquiry:
"Do you ever hear from Ruth?"
It was queer how it arrested them all. He saw Mrs. Lawrence's start and
her quick look over to her daughter--now Edith Lawrence Blair, the Edith
Lawrence who had been Ruth's dearest friend. It was Edith herself who
had most interested him. She had been leaning to the far side of her big
chair in order to escape the shaft of light from the porch lamp. But at
Cora's question she made a quick turn that brought her directly into the
light. It gave her startled face, so suddenly and sharply revealed, an
unmasked aspect as she turned from Cora to him. And when he quietly
answered: "Yes, I had a letter from Ruth this morning," her look of
amazement, of sudden feeling, seemed for the instant caught there in the
light. He got her quick look over to Amy--his bride, and then her
conscious leaning back from the disclosing shaft into the shadow.
He himself had become suddenly conscious of Amy. They had been in
California for their honeymoon, and had just returned to Freeport. Amy
was not a Freeport girl, and was new to his old crowd, which the visit
of Cora Albright was bringing together in various little reunions. She
had been sitting over at the far side of the group, talking with Will
Blair, Edith's husband. Now they too had stopped talking.
"She wanted to know about her father," he added.
No one said anything. That irritated him. It seemed that Edith or her
mother, now that Cora had opened it up, might make some little attempt
at the common decencies of such a situation, might ask if Ruth would
come home if her father died, speak of her as if she were a human being.
Cora did not appear to get from their silence that she was violating
Freeport custom. "Her mother died just about a year after Ruth--left,
didn't she?" she pursued.
"About that," he tersely answered.
"Died of a broken heart," murmured Mrs. Lawrence.
"She died of pneumonia," was his retort, a little sharp for a young man
to an older woman.
Her slight wordless murmur seemed to comment on his failure to see. She
turned to Cora with a tolerant, gently-spoken, "I think Deane would have
to admit that there was little force left for fighting pneumonia.
Certainly it was a broken life!"--that last was less gently said.
Exasperation showed in his shifting of position.
"It needn't have been," he muttered stubbornly.
"Deane--Deane!" she murmured, as if in reproach for something of long
standing. There was a silence in which the whole thing was alive there
for those of them who knew. Cora and Edith, sitting close together, did
not turn to one another. He wondered if they were thinking of the
countless times Ruth had been on that porch with them in the years they
were all growing up together. Edith's face was turned away from the
light now. Suddenly Cora demanded: "Well, there's no prospect at all of
a divorce?"
Mrs. Lawrence rose and went over to Amy and opened a lively conversation
as to whether she found her new maid satisfactory. It left him and Edith
and Cora to themselves.
"No," he answered her question, "I guess not. Not that I know of."
"How terrible it all is!" Cora exclaimed, not without feeling; and then,
following a pause, she and Edith were speaking of how unbecoming the new
hats were, talking of the tea one of their old friends was giving for
Cora next day.
He sat there thinking how it was usually those little things that closed
in over Ruth. When the thought of her, feeling about her, broke through,
it was soon covered over with--oh, discussion of how some one was
wearing her hair, the health of some one's baby or merits of some one's
cook.
He listened to their talk about the changes there had been in Freeport
in the last ten or twelve years. They spoke of deaths, of marriages, of
births; of people who had prospered and people who had gone to pieces;
of the growth of the town, of new people, of people who had moved away.
In a word, they spoke of change. Edith would refer things to him and he
occasionally joined in the talk, but he was thinking less of the
incidents they spoke of than of how it was change they were talking
about. This enumeration of changes gave him a sense of life as a
continuous moving on, as a thing going swiftly by. Life had changed for
all those people they were telling Cora about. It had changed for
themselves too. He had continued to think of Edith and the others as
girls. But they had moved on from that; they were moving on all the
time. Why, they were over thirty! As a matter of fact they were women
near the middle thirties. People talked so lightly of change, and yet
change meant that life was swiftly sweeping one on.
He turned from that too somber thinking to Amy, watched her as she
talked with Mrs. Lawrence. They too were talking of Freeport people and
affairs, the older woman bringing Amy into the current of life there.
His heart warmed a little to Edith's mother for being so gracious to
Amy, though, that did not keep him from marveling at how she could be
both so warm and so hard--so loving within the circle of her approval,
so unrelenting out beyond it.
Amy would make friends, he was thinking, lovingly proud. How could it be
otherwise when she was so lovely and so charming? She looked so slim, so
very young, in that white dress she was wearing. Well, and she was
young, little older now than these girls had been when they really were
"the girls." That bleak sense of life as going by fell away; here _was_
life--the beautiful life he was to have with Amy. He watched the breeze
play with her hair and his whole heart warmed to her in the thought of
the happiness she brought him, in his gratitude for what love made of
life. He forgot his resentment about Ruth, forgot the old bitterness and
old hurt that had just been newly stirred in him. Life had been a lonely
thing for a number of years after Ruth went away. He had Amy now--all
was to be different.
They all stood at the head of the steps for a moment as he and Amy were
bidding the others goodnight. They talked of the tea Edith was to give
for Amy the following week--what Amy would wear--how many people there
would be. "And let me pick you up and take you to the tea tomorrow,"
Edith was saying. "It will be small and informal--just Cora's old
friends--and then you won't have so many strangers to meet next week."
He glowed with new liking of Edith, felt anew that sweetness in her
nature that, after her turning from Ruth, had not been there for him.
Looking at her through this new friendliness he was thinking how
beautifully she had developed. Edith was a mother now, she had two
lovely children. She was larger than in her girlhood; she had indeed
flowered, ripened. Edith was a sweet woman, he was thinking.
"I do think they're the kindest, most beautiful people!" Amy exclaimed
warmly as they started slowly homeward through the fragrant softness of
the May night.