After the maelstrom of passion had thrown her out where life left her
time to think about what she had felt, Ruth Holland would wonder whether
there was something in her that made her different from the good people
of the world. Through it all she did not have the feeling that it would
seem she would have; what she did did not make her feel as she knew,
when she came to think it out, she would be supposed to feel about such
a thing. In hours that would be most condemned she had had a simple
feeling of life as noble. What would be called the basest things she had
done had seemed to free something within her that made her more kind,
more generous, more tender, made her as a singing part of a fine,
beautiful world. Her degradation had seemed to burn away all that was
not pure, giving her a sense of being lifted up; it was as if through
this illicit love a spiritual fount was unsealed that made her
consciously one with life at its highest. Afterwards she wondered about
it, wondered whether she was indeed different from people who were good,
or whether it could be that hearts had been shown, not as they were, but
as it was deemed meet they should be shown.
When she and Deane, with Edith and Will Blair, went home from the dance
that night, something new breathed through the night. It was hard to
join in the talk; she wanted to be alone, alone with that new stir. She
was gentle with Deane as they stood for a moment at the door. She felt
tender toward him. A little throb of excitement in her voice, the way
her eyes shone, made him linger there with her a moment or two. It was
as if he wanted to say something but the timid, clumsy words he spoke
just before leaving were, "That sure is a peach of a dress. You had them
all beat tonight, Ruth," and Ruth went into the house knowing now for
sure how impossible it would be ever to think of Deane "that way." In
the hour before she went to sleep what she meant by "that way" was a
more living thing than it had ever been before.
The year which followed was not a happy one; it was a disturbed, a
fretted year; girlhood was too ruffled for contentment in the old
things, and yet she was not swept on. The social life of the town
brought her and Stuart Williams together from time to time. They always
had several dances together at the parties. It was those dances that
made the party for her. If he were not there, the evening was a dead
thing. When he was, something came to life in her that made everything
different. She would be excited; she had color; her eyes shone. It
made her gay, as an intoxicant may make one gay. Though when she
danced with him she went curiously silent; that stilled her. After
going home she would lie awake for hours, live over every slightest
thing he had said, each glance and move. It was an unreal world
of a new reality--quickened, heightened, delirious, promising.
In that first year she sometimes wondered if it was what would be called
a flirtation. It did not seem so to her, and it was true that after that
first night at the Country Club the quality of flirtation somehow fell
away. Afterwards, when it became the thing that made her life, she
looked back in wonderment to the light little way it had begun. That too
did not seem as it should be--that a thing of such tremendous and
ruthless power, a thing that swept her whole life on at its will, should
come into life in a way so slight, so light, so much of chance. At first
it was just the faintest little breath; but it stirred something, it
grew, it became a great wind that there was no force anywhere to combat.
In that first year there was between them, unspoken of, a consciousness
of feeling touched in the other, a sense of the disturbance, the pull.
It seemed very wonderful to her that just his presence in the room could
make her feel alive in a way she had never felt alive before. And it was
sweet almost beyond belief, it was intoxicating, to come to know that
her presence was that same strange wine to him. She had seen his eyes
anxiously rove a crowded room and stop with her, his face lighting. She
loved remembering his face once at a card party of the older crowd where
she had been tardily summoned by a disappointed hostess. He had been in
the room several minutes, she watching him unseen. He was not looking
anxiously about this time, as she had seen him do at the dancing
parties. She thought he looked tired as he and his wife came in, not as
if anticipating pleasure. Then he saw her and she never forgot that leap
of glad surprise in his eyes, the quick change in him, the new buoyancy.
She would have supposed, thinking back to it afterward, that she would
have drawn back; that before feeling really broke through, a girl such
as she, reared as she had been, a part of such a society, a girl, as
they afterward said, who should have known right from wrong would, in
that time of its gathering, have drawn back from so shameful a thing as
love with another woman's husband. It was as mystifying to her that she
did not fight against it as it was that it should have come. She did not
understand the one nor the other. Certainly it was not as she would have
supposed it would be had she heard of such a thing. Something seemed to
have caught her up, to have taken her. She was appalled at times, but
the truth was that she was carried along almost without resistance;
ideas of resistance were there, but they were pale things, not charged
with power. She would suppose, had she known the story only through
hearing it, that she would have thought intensely and become wretched in
the thought of Mrs. Williams. Perhaps if Mrs. Williams had been a plain
little woman, or a sad looking one, that would have come home to her
harder. But one would not readily pity Marion Williams, or get the
feeling of wronging her. As Marion Averley she had been the reigning
girl of the town. Ruth, ten years younger, had not come far enough out
from her little girl's awe of Marion Averley, the young lady, to be
quick in getting the feeling of wronging Marion Williams, the wife.
Perhaps one would be more slow in getting a feeling of wronging the most
smartly dressed woman in the room than would be the case with the wife
dowdy or drab. Mrs. Williams, while not radiating happiness, seemed
somehow impervious to unhappiness, and certainly to any hurt another
woman could bring her. She had an atmosphere of high self-valuation.
While she never appeared to be having an especially good time she gave a
sense of being perfectly able to command a better one had it pleased her
to do so.
People had supposed that Marion Averley would make a brilliant marriage.
Her grandfather had made his money in lumber, in those early days of
lumber kings on the Mississippi. Locally they were looked upon as rich
people. Marion had gone to a fashionable school, to Europe. People of
the town said there was nothing "local" about her. Other girls had been
as much away and yet would return seeming just a part of the town. That
was why everyone was surprised when the Averleys announced Marion's
engagement to Stuart Williams. He was distinctly local and his people
were less important than hers. He had come home from college and gone
into business. His father had a small canning factory, an industry that
for years had not grown much, remaining one of the small concerns in a
town of rapidly growing manufactories. Stuart went into business with
his father and very soon there were expansions, new methods; he brought
imagination to bear upon it, and a big fund of young man's energy, until
it rapidly came up from a "nice little business" to one of the things
that counted in the town. He had a talent for business; his imagination
worked that way and he was what they called a hustler. He soon became a
part of a number of things, both personal affairs and matters of public
concern. He came to be alluded to as one of the prominent young business
men. Even before Marion Averley married him people were saying that he
would make money.
They liked her for marrying him. They said it showed that there was more
to her than they had supposed, that there was warmth she did not show.
For she must have married him for the good old reason that she had
fallen in love with him. Their engagement brought Stuart Williams into a
new social conspicuousness, though he had the qualities--in particular a
certain easy, sunny manner--that had made him popular all along. During
the engagement people spoke of the way Marion seemed to thaw out; they
liked her much better than they had in the days of being awed by her
sophistication, her aloofness.
After their marriage the Williams' were leaders of the young married
set. Their house was the gayest place in town; Stuart Williams had the
same talent in hospitality that he had for business--growing, perhaps,
out of the same qualities. He was very generally and really deeply
liked; they called him a good fellow, a lovable chap. For about four
years people spoke of it as a successful marriage, though there were no
children. And then, just what it was no one knew, but the Williams'
began to seem different, going to their house became a different thing.
The people who knew Marion best had a feeling that she was not the same
after the visit of that gay little Southern matron whom she had known in
school at Washington. It was very gay at the Williams' through that
visit, and then Marion said she was tired out and they were going to
draw in for a little, and somehow they just never seemed to emerge from
that drawing in. Her friends wondered; they talked about how Stuart and
this friend of Marion's had certainly hit it off wonderfully; some of
them suspected, but Marion gave no confidences. She seemed to carry her
head higher than ever; in fact, in some curious way she seemed to become
Marion Averley again while Stuart Williams concentrated more and more
upon the various business affairs he was being drawn into. It came about
that the Williams' were less and less mentioned when the subject of
happy marriages was up, and when time had swung Ruth Holland and Edith
Lawrence into the social life of the town it was the analytical rather
than the romantically minded citizens who were talking about them.
Perhaps life would have been quite another thing for a number of people
if the Country Club had not decided to replenish its treasury by giving
a play. Mrs. Lawrence was chairman of the entertainment committee. That
naturally brought Edith and Ruth into the play, and one night after one
of those periods of distraction into which the organizer of amateur
theatricals is swept it was Mrs. Lawrence who exclaimed, "Stuart
Williams! Why couldn't he do that part?"--and Stuart Williams, upon
learning who was in the cast, said he would see what he could do with
it.
Again, at the close of the first rehearsal, as they stood about in the
hall at the Lawrences', laughing over mishaps, it was Mrs. Lawrence who
said, "You and Ruth go the same way, don't you, Stuart?"
Tonight they were going that way after the final rehearsal. It was later
than usual; they went slowly, saying little. They had fallen silent as
they neared Ruth's home; they walked slowly and in silence outside the
fence; paused an instant at the gate, then, very slowly, started up the
walk which led to the big white square house and came to a stop beneath
the oak tree which was so near the house that its branches brushed the
upper window panes.
They stood there silent; the man knew that he ought to go at once; that
in that silence the feeling which words had so thinly covered would
break through and take them. But knowing he should go seemed without
power to make him go. He watched the girl's slightly averted face. He
knew why it was averted. He felt sure that he was not alone in what he
felt.
And so he stood there in the sweetness of that knowing, the sweetness of
that understanding why she held herself almost rigid like that, feeling
surging higher in him in the thought that she too was fighting feeling.
The breeze moved the hair on her temples; he could see the throb in her
uncovered throat, her thin white dress moving over her quick breathing.
Life was in her, and the desire for life. She seemed so tender, so
sensitive.
He moved a step nearer her, unable to deny himself the sweetness of
confirming what it was so wonderful to think. "I won't be taking you
home tomorrow night," he said.
She looked at him, then swiftly turned away, but not before he had seen
her eyes.
"Shall you care?" he pressed it, unsteadily.
He knew by her high head, her tenseness, that she was fighting something
back; and he saw the quivering of her tender mouth.
She cared! She _did_ care. Here was a woman who cared; a woman who
wanted love--his love; a woman for whom life counted, as it counted for
him. After barren, baffled days, days of denial and humiliation, the
sweetness of being desired possessed him overwhelmingly as they stood
there in the still, fragrant night before the darkened house.
He knew that he must go; he _had_ to go; it was go now, or--. But still
he just stood there, unable to do what he knew he should do, reason
trying to get hold of that moment of gathering passion, training
striving to hold life.
It was she who brought them together. With a smothered passionate little
sob she had swayed toward him, and then she was in his arms and he was
kissing her wet eyes, that tender mouth, the slim throbbing throat.