Her instinct to protect herself from this young girl was the thing that
gained composure for her. At first it was simply one of those physical
instincts that draw us back from danger, from pain; and then she threw
the whole force of her will to keeping that semblance of composure. Her
instinct was not to let reserves break down, not to show agitation; to
protect herself by never leaving commonplace ground. It was terribly
hard--this driving back the flood-tide of feeling and giving no sign of
the struggle, the resentment. It was as if every nerve had been charged
to full life and then left there outraged.
But she could do it; she could appear pleasantly surprised at Mildred's
having come to take her for a drive, could talk along about the little
things that must be her shield against the big ones. Something in her
had gone hard in that first moment of realizing who Mildred was. She was
not going to be driven back again! And so she forced herself to talk
pleasantly of the country through which they went, of Mildred's horse,
of driving and riding.
But it was impossible not to grow a little interested in this young
Mildred Woodbury. She sat erect and drove in a manner that had the
little tricks of worldliness, but was somehow charming in spite of its
artificiality. Ruth was thinking that Mildred was a more sophisticated
young person than she herself had been at that age. She wondered if
sophistication was increasing in the world, if there was more of it in
Freeport than there used to be.
They talked of Ruth's father, of Mildred's people, of the neighborhood
both knew so well. From that it drifted to the social life of the town.
She was amused, rather sadly amused, at Mildred's air of superiority
about it; it seemed so youthful, so facile. Listening to Mildred now
pictures flashed before her: she and Edith Lawrence--girls of about
fifteen--going over to the Woodburys' and eagerly asking, "Could we take
the baby out, Mrs. Woodbury?" "Now you'll be very, very careful, girls?"
Mrs. Woodbury would say, wrapping Mildred all up in soft pink things.
"Oh, _yes_, Mrs. Woodbury," they would reply, a little shocked that she
could entertain the thought of their not being careful. And then they
would start off cooing girlish things about the cunning little darling.
This was that baby--in spite of her determination to hold aloof from
Mildred there was no banishing it; no banishing the apprehension that
grew with the girl's talk. For Mildred seemed so much a part of the very
thing for which she had this easy scorn. Something in the way she held
the lines made it seem she would not belong anywhere else. She looked so
carefully prepared for the very life for which she expressed disdain.
She tried to forget the things that were coming back to her--how Mildred
would gleefully hold up her hands to have her mittens put on when she
and Edith were about to take her out, and tried too to turn the
conversation--breaking out with something about Mrs. Herman's children.
But it became apparent that Mildred was not to be put off. Everything
Ruth would call up to hold her off she somehow forced around to an
approach for what she wanted to say.
And then it came abruptly, as if she were tired of trying to lead up to
it. "I've been wanting to see you--Ruth," she hesitated over the name,
but brought it out bravely, and it occurred to Ruth then that Mildred
had not known how to address her. "When I heard you were here," she
added, "I was determined you shouldn't get away without my seeing you."
Ruth looked at her with a little smile, moved, in spite of herself, by
the impetuousness of the girl's tone, by something real that broke
through the worldly little manner.
"I don't feel as the rest of them do." She flushed and said it
hurriedly, a little tremulously; and yet there was something direct and
honest in her eyes, as if she were going to say it whether it seemed
nice taste or not. It reached Ruth, went through her self-protective
determination not to be reached. Her heart went out to Mildred's youth,
to this appeal from youth, moved by the freshness and realness beneath
that surface artificiality, saddened by this defiance of one who, it
seemed, could so little understand how big was the thing she defied, who
seemed so much the product of the thing she scorned, so dependent on
what she was apparently in the mood to flout. "I don't know that they
are to be blamed for their feeling, Mildred," she answered quietly.
"Oh, yes, they are!" hotly contended the girl. "It's because they don't
understand. It's because they _can't_ understand!" The reins had fallen
loose in her hand; the whip sagged; she drooped--that stiff, chic little
manner gone. She turned a timid, trusting face to Ruth--a light shining
through troubled eyes. "It's love that counts, isn't it,--Ruth?" she
asked, half humble, half defiant.
It swept Ruth's heart of everything but sympathy. Her hand closed over
Mildred's. "What is it, dear?" she asked. "Just what is it?"
Mildred's eyes filled. Ruth could understand that so well--what sympathy
meant to a feeling shut in, a feeling the whole world seemed against.
"It's with me--as it was with you," the girl answered very low and
simply. "It's--like that."
Ruth shut her eyes for an instant; they were passing something fragrant;
it came to her--an old fragrance--like something out of things past; a
robin was singing; she opened her eyes and looked at Mildred, saw the
sunshine finding gold in the girl's hair. The sadness of it--of youth
and suffering, of pain in a world of beauty, that reach of pain into
youth, into love, made it hard to speak. "I'm sorry, dear," was all she
could say.
They rode a little way in silence; Ruth did not know how to speak, what
to say; and then Mildred began to talk, finding relief in saying things
long held in. Ruth understood that so well. Oh, she understood it all so
well--the whole tumult of it, the confused thinking, the joy, the
passion,--the passion that would sacrifice anything, that would let the
whole world go. Here it was again. She knew just what it was.
"So you can see," Mildred was saying, "what you have meant to me."
Yes, she could see that.
They were driving along the crest of the hills back of the town. Mildred
pointed to it. "That town isn't the whole of the world!" she exclaimed
passionately, after speaking of the feeling that was beginning to form
there against herself. "What do I care?" she demanded defiantly. "It's
not the whole of the world!"
Ruth looked at it. She could see the Lawrence house--it had a high place
and was visible from all around; Mildred's home was not far from there;
her own old home was only a block farther on. She had another one of
those flashing pictures from things far back: Mrs. Woodbury--Mildred's
mother--standing at the door with a bowl of chicken broth for Mrs.
Holland--Ruth's mother--who was ill. "I thought maybe this would taste
good," she could hear Mrs. Woodbury saying. Strange how things one had
forgotten came back. Other things came back as for a moment she
continued to look at the town where both she and Mildred had been
brought up, where their ties were. Then she turned back to Mildred, to
this other girl who, claimed by passionate love, was in the mood to let
it all go. "But that's just what it is, Mildred," she said. "The trouble
is, it _is_ the whole of the world."
"It's the whole of the social world," she answered the look of surprise.
"It's just the same everywhere. And it's astonishing how united the
world is. You give it up in one place--you've about given it up for
every place."
"Then the whole social world's not worth it!" broke from Mildred. "It's
not worth--enough."
Ruth found it hard to speak; she did not know what to say. She had a
flashing sense of the haphazardness of life, of the power, the flame
this found in Mildred that the usual experiences would never have found,
of how, without it, she would doubtless have developed much like the
other girls of her world--how she might develop because of it--how human
beings were shaped by chance. She looked at Mildred's face--troubled,
passionate, a confused defiance, and yet something real there looking
through the tumult, something flaming, something that would fight, a
something, she secretly knew, more flaming, more fighting, than might
ever break to life in Mildred again. And then she happened to look down
at the girl's feet--the very smart low shoes of dull kid, perfectly
fitted, high arched--the silk stockings, the slender ankle. They seemed
so definitely feet for the places prepared, for the easier ways, not
fitted for going a hard way alone. It made her feel like a mother who
would want to keep a child from a way she herself knew as too hard.
"But what are you going to put in the place of that social world,
Mildred?" she gently asked. "There must be something to fill its place.
What is that going to be?"
"Love will fill its place!" came youth's proud, sure answer.
Ruth was looking straight ahead; the girl's tone had thrilled her--that
faith in love, that courage for it. It was so youthful!--so youthfully
sure, so triumphant in blindness. Youth would dare so much--youth knew
so little. She did not say anything; she could not bear to.
"Love can fill its place!" Mildred said again, as if challenging that
silence. And as still Ruth did not speak she demanded, sharply, "Can't
it?"
Ruth turned to her a tender, compassionate face, too full of feeling, of
conflict, to speak. Slowly, as if she could not bear to do it, she shook
her head.
Mildred looked just dazed for a moment, then so much as if one in whom
she had trusted, on whom she had counted for a great deal had failed her
that Ruth made a little gesture as if to say it was not that, as if to
say she was sorry it seemed like that.
Mildred did not heed it. "But it has with you," she insisted.
"It has _not_!" leaped out the low, savage answer that startled the
woman from whom it came. "It has not!" she repeated fiercely.
Her rage was against the feeling that seemed to trick one like that; the
way love _got_ one--made one believe that nothing else in the world
mattered but just itself. It wasn't fair! It was cruel! That made her
savage--savage for telling Mildred the other side of it, the side love
blinded her too. In that moment it seemed that love was a trap; it took
hold of one and persuaded one things were true that weren't true! Just
then it seemed a horrible thing the way love got one through lovely
things, through beauty and tenderness, through the sweetest things--then
did as it pleased with the life it had stolen in upon. Fiercely she
turned the other face, told Mildred what love in loneliness meant, what
it meant to be shut away from one's own kind, what that hurting of other
lives did to one's self, what isolation made of one, what it did to
love. Things leaped out that she had never faced, had never admitted for
true; the girl to whom she talked was frightened and she was frightened
herself--at what she told of what she herself had felt, feeling that she
had never admitted she had had. She let the light in on things kept in
the dark even in her own soul--a cruel light, a light that spared
nothing, that seemed to find a savage delight in exposing the things
deepest concealed. She would show the other side of it! There was a
certain gloating in doing it--getting ahead of a thing that would trick
one. And then that spent itself as passion will and she grew quieter and
talked in a simple way of what loneliness meant, of what longing for
home meant, of what it meant to know one had hurt those who had always
been good to one, who loved and trusted. She spoke of her mother--of her
father, and then she broke down and cried and Mildred listened in
silence to those only half-smothered sobs.
When Ruth was able to stop she looked up, timidly, at Mildred. Something
seemed to have gone out of the girl--something youthful and superior,
something radiant and assured. She looked crumpled up. The utter misery
in her eyes, about her mouth, made Ruth whisper: "I'm sorry, Mildred."
Mildred looked at her with a bitter little laugh and then turned quickly
away.
Ruth had never felt more wretched in her life than when, without Mildred
having said a word, they turned in the gate leading up to Annie's. She
wanted to say something to comfort. She cast around for something.
"Maybe," she began, "that it will come right--anyway."
Again Mildred only laughed in that hard little way.
When they were half way up the hill Mildred spoke, as if, in miserable
uncertainty, thinking things aloud. "Mrs. Blair has asked me to go to
Europe with her for the summer," she said, in a voice that seemed to
have no spring left in it. "She's chaperoning a couple of girls. I could
go with them."
"Oh, _do_, Mildred!" cried Ruth. "Do that!" It seemed to her wonderfully
tender, wonderfully wise, of Edith. She was all eagerness to induce
Mildred to go with Edith.
But there was no answering enthusiasm. Mildred drooped. She did not look
at Ruth. "I could do that," she said in a lifeless way, as if it didn't
matter much what she did.
When they said good-by Mildred's broken smile made Ruth turn hastily
away. But she looked back after the girl had driven off, wanting to see
if she was sitting up in that sophisticated little way she had. But
Mildred was no longer sitting that way. She sagged, as if she did not
care anything about how she sat. Ruth stood looking after her, watching
as far as she could see her, longing to see her sit up, to see her hold
the whip again in that stiff, chic little fashion. But she did not do
it; her horse was going along as if he knew there was no interest in
him. Ruth could not bear it. If only the whip would go up at just that
right little angle! But it did not. She could not see the whip at
all--only the girl's drooping back.