“I’m sure it isn’t anything you’ve done, nor anything maybe that you’re likely to do. I don’t know just what it is, or how to say it. But, Jeffrey, you remember what you said that day in the Bishop’s house at Alden?”
“Yes, and I remember what you said, too.”
“We both meant it,” Ruth returned gravely, not attempting to evade any of the meaning that he had thrown into his words. “And we both mean it now, I’m sure. But there’s a difference, Jeffrey, a difference with you.”
“I don’t know it,” he said a little shortly. “I’m still doing just the thing I started out to do that day.”
“Yes. But that day you started out to fight for the people. Now you are fighting for yourself–– Oh, not for anything selfish! Not for anything you want for yourself! I know that. But you have made the fight your own. It is your own quarrel now. You are fighting because you have come to hate the railroad people.”
“Well, you wouldn’t expect me to love them?”
“No. I’m not blaming you, Jeff. But––but, I’m afraid. Hate is a terrible thing. I wish you were out of it all. Hate can only hurt you. I’m afraid of a scar that it might leave on you through all the long, long years of life. Can you see? I’m afraid of something that might go deeper 122 than all this, something that might go as deep as life. After all, that’s what I’m afraid of, I guess––Life, great, big, terrible, menacing, Life!”
“My life?” Jeffrey asked gruffly.
“I have faced that,” the girl answered evenly, “just as you have faced it. And I am not afraid of that. No. It’s what you might do in anger––if they hurt you again. Something that would scar your heart and your soul. Jeffrey, do you know that sometimes I’ve seen the worst, the worst––even murder in your eyes!”
“I wish,” the boy returned shortly, “the Bishop would keep his religion out of all this. He’s a good man and a good friend,” he went on, “but I don’t like this religion coming into everything.”