When she reached the hall she faced about. There was something she still wanted to say.
“Don’t take it to heart, Miss Tracy. Your own broken romance, I mean. He was never the man for you. You have ideals. He has none. There are a thousand women with whom he will be just as well satisfied as he would have been with you. But for you there is but one man in all the world. And when he comes to you you will know him, and you will love him, and you will be supremely, oh, supremely happy. For there’s nothing so beautiful, so wonderful, so heavenly in a woman’s life as this love for the one man, if only he loves her.”
That it came from her heart as well as from her lips, this message of hope and comfort, there could be no shadow of doubt. Her eyes were full of it, her countenance was aglow with it. But what lay back of it in her own life’s experience that should give it such eloquent and passionate voice?
Before Ruth could recover sufficiently from her surprise to reply intelligently the woman had said good-bye and was gone. She hurried down the pavement in the December dusk, looking neither to the right nor left. The night was cold, the air was frosty, the stars were beginning to show in the clear sky. At the corner of Grove Street and Fountain Lane Stephen Lamar met her. He came upon her suddenly and she was startled.
“You shouldn’t have frightened me so,” she said.
“I was waiting for you,” he replied. “I knew you were in the Tracy house.”
“How did you know it?”
“A socialist friend of mine saw you go in and told me.”
“And what business was it of your socialist friend where I went?”
“To speak frankly, Mary, they don’t like your consorting so freely with people of that class: this Tracy girl, and the fighting parson, and half-baked young Malleson and others of that ilk.”