Fidelity. Susan Glaspell

back to her shoulder. "Well, that's very nice," he said quietly.

      "She's coming to see me. I'm sure I found her anything but cold and hard!"

      "I don't think that a woman—" he began hotly, but checked himself.

      But all the feeling that had been alive there just beneath Amy's cool exterior flamed through. "Well, how you can stand up for a woman who did what that woman did—!"

      Her cheeks were flaming now, her nostrils quivered. "I guess you're the only person in town that does stand up for her! But of course you're right—and the rest of them—" She broke off with a tumultuous little laugh and abruptly got up and went into the house.

      He sat there for a time alone, sick at heart. He told himself he had bungled the whole thing. Why hadn't he told Amy all about Ruth, putting it in a way that would get her sympathies. Surely he could have done that had he told her the story as he knew it, made her feel what Ruth had suffered, how tormented and bewildered and desperate she had been. Now she had the town's side and naturally resented his championing of what was presented as so outrageous a thing. He went over the story as Edith would give it. That was enough to vindicate Amy.

      He rose and followed her into the house. She was fingering some music on the piano. He saw how flushed her face was, how high she carried her head and how quick her breathing.

      He went and put his arms around her. "Sweetheart," he said very simply and gently, "I love you. You know that, don't you?"

      An instant she held back in conflict. Then she hid her face against him and sobbed. He held her close and murmured soothing little things.

      She was saying something. "I was so happy," he made out the smothered words. "It was all so—beautiful."

      "But you're happy now," he insisted. "It's beautiful now."

      "I feel as if my marriage was being—spoiled," she choked.

      He shook her, playfully, but his voice as he spoke was not playful. "Look here, Amy, don't say such a thing. Don't let such a thing get into your head for an instant! Our happiness isn't a thing to talk like that about."

      "I feel as if—that woman—was standing between us!"

      He raised her face and made her look into his own, at once stern and very tender. "Amy love, we've got to stop this right now. A long time ago—more than ten years ago—there was a girl here who had an awfully hard time. I was sorry for her. I'm sorry for her now. Life's hit her good and hard. We're among the fortunate people things go right for. We can be together—happy, having friends, everybody approving, everybody good to us. We're mighty lucky that it is that way. And isn't our own happiness going to make us a little sorry for people who are outside all this?" He kissed her. "Come now, sweetheart, you're not going to harden up like that. Why, that wouldn't be you at all!"

      She was quiet; after a little she smiled up at him, the sweet, reminiscently plaintive little smile of one just comforted. For the moment, at least, love had won her. "Sometime I'll tell you anything about it you want to know," he said, holding her tenderly and smoothing her hair. "Meanwhile—let's forget it. Come on now, honey, change your dress—get into something warmer and go for a ride with me. I've got to make a couple of calls, and I want you along."

      "You know," he was saying as he unfastened her dress for her, "after I knew I was going to have you, and before I got you here, I used to think so much about this very thing—the fun of having you going around with me—doing things together. Now it seems—" He did not finish, for he was passionately kissing the white shoulder which the unfastened dress had bared. "Amy, dear,"—his voice choked—"oh, doesn't it seem too good to be true?"

      His feeling for her had chased the other things away. She softened to happiness, then grew gay. They were merry and happy again. All seemed well with them. But when, on his rounds, they passed the Hollands' and Ted waved from the porch he had an anxious moment of fearing she would ask who that was and their crust of happiness would let them through. He quickly began a spirited account of an amusing thing that had happened in the office that day. His dream had been of a happiness into which he could sink, not ground on the surface that must be fought for and held by effort; but he did not let himself consider that then.

CHAPTER FIVE

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      The train for Chicago was several hours out from Denver when the man who had decided that it was an uninteresting car began watching the woman who was facing him from several seats away. He was one of those persons with a drab exterior but not a similarly colored imagination, and he was always striving to defeat the meager life his exterior consigned him to by projecting himself into the possible experiences of people he watched on the trains.

      Afterwards he wondered that he should at first have passed this woman by with the mere impression of a nice-looking woman who seemed tired. It was when he chanced to look at her as she was looking from the window that she arrested him. Her sweet face had steeled itself to something, she was as if looking out at a thing that hurt her, but looking with the courage to bear that hurt. He turned and looked from the window in the direction of her intense gaze and then smiled at himself as he turned back from the far-reaching monotonous plain of Eastern Colorado; he might have known that what she was looking at was not spread out there for anyone else to see.

      She interested him all through the two days. She puzzled him. He relieved the tedium of the journey with speculations on what sort of thing it was she was thinking about, going over. He would arrive at a conclusion in which he felt considerable satisfaction only to steal another look at her and find that she did not look at all like the woman he had made up his mind she was. What held him was the way feeling shaped her. She had a delicate, sweet face, but there were times when it was almost repellent in its somberness, when it hardened in a way that puzzled him. She would sit looking from the window and it was as if a dense sadness had settled down upon her; then her face would light with a certain sad tenderness, and once he had the fancy of her lifting her head out of gloom to listen to a beautiful, far-away call. There were long meditations, far steady looks out at something, little reminiscent smiles that lingered about her sensitive mouth after her eyes had gone sad again. She would grow tired of thinking and close her eyes and seem to try to rest. Her face, at those times, showed the wear of hard years, laying bare lines that one took no count of when her eyes were lighted and her mouth sensitive. Frequently she would turn from herself and smile at the baby across the aisle; but once, when the baby was crowing and laughing she abruptly turned away. He tried to construct "a life" for her, but she did not stay in any life he carefully arranged. There were times when he impatiently wondered why he should be wondering so much about her; those were the times when she seemed to have let it all go, was inert. But though he did not succeed in getting a "life" for her, she gave him a freshened sense of life as immensely interesting, as charged with pain and sweetness.

      It was over the pain and the sweetness of life that this woman—Ruth Holland—brooded during the two days that carried her back to the home of her girlhood. She seemed to be going back over a long bridge. That part of her life had been cut away from her. With most lives the past grew into the future; it was as a growth that spread, the present but the extent of the growth at the moment. With her there had been the sharp cut; not a cut, but a tear, a tear that left bleeding ends. Back there lay the past, a separated thing. During the eleven years since her life had been torn from that past she had seen it not only as a separate thing but a thing that had no reach into the future. The very number of miles between, the fact that she made no journeys back home, contributed to that sense of the cleavage, the remoteness, the finality. Those she had left back there remained real and warm in her memory, but her part with them was a thing finished. It was as if only shoots of pain could for the minute unite them.

      Turning her face back toward home turned her back to herself there. She dwelt upon home as she had left it, then formed the picture of what she would find now. Her mother and her grandfather would not be there. The father she had left would not