"Nay," he said, and went out.
CHAPTER XVI
THE GRANDMOTHER
Ruth and her mother-in-law frequently met in the steep and curling streets of Old Town as they went about their business. They knew and tacitly ignored each other. But Ernie's children were not to be ignored. They knocked eternally at their granny's heart. When of summer evenings their mother took her little brood to Saffrons Croft and sat with them beneath the elms, her latest baby in her arms, the others clouding her feet like giant daisies, Anne Caspar, limping by on flat feet with her string bag, would be wrung to the soul.
She hungered for her grand-children, longed to feel their limbs, and see their bodies, to hold them in her lap, to bathe them, win their smiles, and hear their prattle.
Pride, which she mistook for principle, stood between her and happiness.
Ruth knew all that was passing in the elder woman's heart, and felt for the other a profound and disturbing sympathy. She had the best of it; and she knew that Anne Caspar, for all her pharisaic air of superiority, knew it too. Ruth had learnt from Mrs. Trupp something of the elder woman's story. Anne Caspar too, it seemed, had loved out of her sphere; but she, unlike Ruth, had achieved her man. Had she been happy? That depended on whether she had brought happiness to her husband—Ruth never doubted that. And Ruth knew that she had not; and knew that Anne Caspar knew that she had not.
Moreover, all that Ernie told her about his mother interested her curiously: the elder woman's pride, her loneliness, her passion for her old man.
"Alf's mother over again," Ern told Ruth, "with all her qualities only one—but it's the one that matters. He's a worker same as she is. He means to get on, same as she done. There's just this difference atween em: Alf can't love; Mother can—though it's only one." ...
A week after his first visit Alf appeared again on Ruth's door-step.