ed an instant on the stairs, not able to push past that
thought, not able to stay the loving rush of gratefulness that broke out
of the thought of having always been wanted.

She had a confused sense of Edith as barricaded by her trousseau. She
sat behind a great pile of white things; she had had them all out of her
chest for showing to some of her mother's friends, she said, and her
mother had not yet put them back. Ruth stood there fingering a
wonderfully soft chemise. It had come to her that she was not provided
with things like these. What would Edith think of her, going away
without the things it seemed one should have? It seemed to mark the
setting of her apart from Edith, though there was a wave of
tenderness--she tried to hold it back but could not--for dear Edith
because she did have so many things like this.

Edith was too deep in the occupation of getting married to mark an
unusual absorption in her friend. She was full of talk about what her
mother's friends had said of her things, the presents that were coming
in, her dress for the party that night, the flowers for the wedding.

It made Edith seem very young to her. And in her negligee, her hair
down, she looked childish. Her pleasure in the plans for her wedding
seemed like a child's pleasure. It seemed that hurting her in it would
be horribly like spoiling a child's party. Edith's flushed face, her
sparkling eyes, her little excited, happy laugh made it impossible for
Ruth to speak the words she had come to say.

For three days it went on like that: going ahead with the festivities,
constantly thinking she would tell Edith as soon as they got home from
this place or that, waiting until this or that person had gone, then
dumb before the childish quality of Edith's excitement, deciding to wait
until the next morning because Edith was either too happy or too tired
to talk to her that night. That ingenuousness of her friend's pleasure
in her wedding made Ruth feel, not only older, but removed from her by
experience. Those days of her own frozen misery were days of tenderness
for Edith, that tenderness which one well along the road of living feels
for the one just setting feet upon the path.

She was never able to understand how she did get through those days. It
was an almost unbelievable thing that, knowing, she was able, up to the
very last, to go right on with the old things, was able to talk to
people as if nothing were different, to laugh, to dance.