-maybe--" He broke off, reached out for her hands, and could only
stammer, "Oh, Ruth!--I love you so!"

He had her hands; he was clutching them very tight; he looked up at her
again, imploring. She started to shake her head again, but did not
really do it. She seemed about to speak, but did not. What could she say
to Deane--how make him understand?--unless she told him. She thought of
the years she had known him, how much they had been together, how good
he had been to her. Again her eyes were misty. It was all so tangled.
There was so much pain.

Feeling her softening, her tenderness, he moved nearer, her two hands
pressed together so tight in his that it hurt her. "It wouldn't be so
bad, would it, Ruth?" he urged wistfully, with a little laugh that broke
with emotion. "You and I--mightn't life go pretty well for us?"

She turned away, looking out into the night. Feeling something in her
that he did not understand he let her hands go. She put one of them up,
still further averting her face, lost to him in the picture forming
itself before her of how life would be if love came right; what it would
mean not to have to hide, but to have those who cared for her happy in
her happiness; what it would mean to give herself to love without fear,
to wear her joy proudly before the world, revealing her womanhood. She
was not thinking of what life with Deane would be but of what love that
could have its place would be: telling her mother and father and Edith,
being able to show the pride of being loved, the triumph of loving.
Sitting there, turning her face from this friend who loved her, she
seemed to be turning it to the years awaiting her, years of desperately
clutching at happiness in tension and fear, not understood because
unable to show herself,--afraid, harassed, perhaps disgraced. She wanted
to take her place among women who loved and were loved! She did not want
to be shut away from her friends, not seeming to understand what she
understood so well. This picture of what life would be if love could
have its place brought home to her what it meant to love and perpetually
conceal, stealing one's happiness from the society in which one lived.
Why could it not have gone right for her too, as it had for Cora and
would for Edith? She too wanted a wedding, she too wanted rejoicing
friends.

She hid her face in her hands. Her body was quivering.

The boy's arm stole round her shoulders. She was feeling--maybe she did
care. "