uggle and fear and the passionate
determination to have in spite of everything had made terribly intense.
They had closed themselves in with that little while of love, holding it
apart from everything else, and yet every minute of it was charged with
the consciousness of what was all around them. They had clung to that
hour with a desperate passion, the joy of the moment that was there
always stabbed with pain for a moment passing. At the last they had
clung to each other as if time too--time, over which they had no
control--was going to beat them apart. So much had been hard that in
returning she had a warm feeling of gratitude to all of them for not
making it harder for her, not questioning, exposing her; relief was so
great that they were all newly dear for thus letting her alone. She had
managed all right with Deane, the clumsy arrangement she had been forced
into appeared to have just that haphazardness which characterizes most
of the arrangements of life. Her mother had merely asked what the
Lawrence's had for dinner; her father joked about the way she had
trained the roses in the back yard. Strangely enough instead of feeling
she had outraged them, been unworthy this easy, affectionate
intercourse, she had a sense, now that she had again come through a
precarious thing safely, of having saved them from something they knew
not of, a strange lifted-up feeling of bearing something for them.
Certainly that would not seem the feeling she should be having, but
there was the odd part of it: the feelings she had were so seldom those
she would expect herself to have.

Her mother and father had gone indoors; Cyrus sat out there with her and
Deane for a time. Ruth did not love Cyrus as she loved Ted; he had
always had too superior a manner with her for her feeling to be more
than the perfunctory thing which sometimes passes for personal affection
in families. It was simply that she had never admitted, even to herself,
that she did not love him. He belonged to the set just older than
Ruth's, though she and Deane and their friends were arriving now at the
time of ceasing to be a separate entity as the young crowd and were
being merged in the group just above them. That contributed to Cyrus's
condescension, he being tempered for condescension.

When she and Deane were alone the talk lagged, Ruth sitting there at the
head of the steps leaning against the pillar, he a few steps below her,
sprawled out in awkward boyish fashion,