"You do look tired, Ruth," said Harriett compassionately.
Harriett said she had come for a little visit with Ruth, and Annie proposed that they go up under the trees at the crest of the hill back of the house. It was where Ruth had sat with Annie just the day before. As she sat down there now it seemed it was ages ago since she and Annie had sat there tying the asparagus into bunches.
Annie had come up with some buttermilk for them. As she handed Ruth hers she gave her shoulder an affectionate little pat, as if, looking at her face, she wanted to tell her to take heart. Then she went back to the house, leaving the two sisters alone.
They drank their buttermilk, talking of it, of Annie's place, of her children. In a languid way Ruth was thinking that it was good of Harriett to come and see her; had she come the day before, she would have been much pleased. In that worn way, she was pleased now; doubtless it had been hard for Harriett to come—so busy, and not well. Perhaps her coming meant real defiance. Anyway, it was good of her to come. She tried to be nice to Harriett, to talk about things as if she liked having her there to talk with. But that final picture of Mildred's drooping back was right there before her all the time. As she talked with Harriett about the price of butter and eggs—the living to be had in selling them, she was all the while seeing Mildred—Mildred as she had been when Ruth got into the buggy; as she said, "Love can take its place!"—as she was when she drove away. She had a sick feeling of having failed; she had failed the very thing in Mildred to which she had elected to be faithful in herself. And why? What right had one to say that another was not strong enough? How did one know? And yet she wanted Mildred to go with Edith; she believed that she would—now. That blighting sense of failure, of having been unfaithful, could not kill a feeling of relief. Did it mean that she was, after all, just like Edith? Had her venturing, her experience, left her much as she would have been without it? Just before meeting Mildred she was strong in the feeling of having gained something from the hard way she had gone alone. She was going on! That was what it had shown her—that one was to go on. Then she had to listen to Mildred—and she was back with the very people she had felt she was going on past—one with those people she had so triumphantly decided were not worth her grieving for them.
She had been so sure—so radiantly sure, happy in that sense of having, at last, found herself, of being rid of fears and griefs and incertitudes. Then she met Mildred. It came to her then—right while she was talking with Harriett about what Flora Copeland was going to do now that the house would be broken up—that it was just that thing which kept the world conservative. It was fear for others. It was that feeling she had when she looked down at Mildred's feet.
One did not have that feeling when one looked at one's own feet. Fear of pain for others was quite unlike fear for one's self. Courage for one's self one could gain; in the fires of the heart that courage was forged. When the heart was warm with the thing one wanted to do one said no price in pain could be too great. But courage for others had to be called from the mind. It was another thing. When it was some one else,—one younger, one who did not seem strong—then one distrusted the feeling and saw large the pain. One knew one could bear pain one's self. There was something not to be borne in thinking of another's pain. That was why, even among venturers, few had the courage to speak for venturing. There was something in humankind—it was strongest in womankind—made them, no matter how daring for themselves, cautious for others. And perhaps that, all crusted round with things formal and lifeless, was the living thing at the heart of the world's conservatism.
Harriett was talking of the monument Cyrus thought there should be at the cemetery; Ruth listened and replied—seemed only tired, and all the while these thoughts were shaping themselves in her inner confusion and disheartenment. She would rather have stopped thinking of it, but could not. She had been too alive when checked; there was too much emotion in that inner confusion. She wondered if she would ever become sure of anything; if she would ever have, and keep, that courage of confidence which she had thought, for just a few radiant moments, she had. She would like to talk to Annie about it, but she had a feeling that she was not fit to talk to Annie. Annie was not one of those to run back at the first thought of another's pain. That, too, Annie could face. Better let them in for pain than try to keep them from life, Annie would say. She could hear her saying it—saying that even that concern for others was not the noblest thing. Fearing would never set the world free, would be Annie's word. Not to keep people in the safe little places, but to shape a world where there need not be safe little places! While she listened to what Harriett said of how much such a monument as Cyrus wanted would cost, she could hear Annie's sharp-edged little voice making those replies to her own confusion, could hear her talking of a sterner, braver people—hardier souls—who would one day make a world where fear was not the part of kindness. Annie would say that it was not the women who would protect other women who would shape the future in which there need not be that tight little protection.
She sighed heavily and pushed back her hair with a gesture of great weariness. "Poor Ruth!" it made Harriett murmur, "you haven't really got rested at all, have you?"
She pulled herself up and smiled as best she could at her sister, who had spoken to her with real feeling. "I did," she said with a little grimace that carried Harriett back a long way, "then I got so rested I got to thinking about things—then I got tired again." She flushed after she had said it, for that was the closest they had come to the things they kept away from.
"Poor Ruth," Harriett murmured again. "And I'm afraid," she added with a little laugh, "that now I'm going to make you more tired."