He stood there doggedly for a moment, his face working with nervousness. "I think then," he said roughly, "that we'd better be decent enough to get a divorce!" At what he saw in her face he cried passionately: "Oh no, you don't believe in divorce—but you believe in this!"
"Was it I who brought it about?" she cried, stung to anger.
She had risen and for an instant they stood there facing each other. "Haven't you any humanity?" he shot rudely at her. "Don't you ever feel?"
She colored but drew back, in command of herself again. "I do not desecrate my feelings," she said with composure; "I don't degrade my humanity."
"Feeling—humanity!" he sneered, and wheeled about and left the room.
He started at once for his rehearsal. He was trembling with anger and yet underneath that passion was an unacknowledged feeling of relief. It had seemed that he had to do something; now he told himself that he had done what he could. He walked slowly through the soft night, seeking control. He was very bitter toward Marion, and yet in his heart he knew that he had asked for what he no longer wanted. He quickened his step toward the Lawrences', where they were to hold the rehearsal, where he would find Ruth Holland.
CHAPTER EIGHT
After the maelstrom of passion had thrown her out where life left her time to think about what she had felt, Ruth Holland would wonder whether there was something in her that made her different from the good people of the world. Through it all she did not have the feeling that it would seem she would have; what she did did not make her feel as she knew, when she came to think it out, she would be supposed to feel about such a thing. In hours that would be most condemned she had had a simple feeling of life as noble. What would be called the basest things she had done had seemed to free something within her that made her more kind, more generous, more tender, made her as a singing part of a fine, beautiful world. Her degradation had seemed to burn away all that was not pure, giving her a sense of being lifted up; it was as if through this illicit love a spiritual fount was unsealed that made her consciously one with life at its highest. Afterwards she wondered about it, wondered whether she was indeed different from people who were good, or whether it could be that hearts had been shown, not as they were, but as it was deemed meet they should be shown.
When she and Deane, with Edith and Will Blair, went home from the dance that night, something new breathed through the night. It was hard to join in the talk; she wanted to be alone, alone with that new stir. She was gentle with Deane as they stood for a moment at the door. She felt tender toward him. A little throb of excitement in her voice, the way her eyes shone, made him linger there with her a moment or two. It was as if he wanted to say something but the timid, clumsy words he spoke just before leaving were, "That sure is a peach of a dress. You had them all beat tonight, Ruth," and Ruth went into the house knowing now for sure how impossible it would be ever to think of Deane "that way." In the hour before she went to sleep what she meant by "that way" was a more living thing than it had ever been before.