ently 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