"The idea doesn't seem to me preposterous," he answered.
Feeling the coldness in his own voice he realized how he was at the very start getting away from the thing he wanted to do, was estranging Amy by his resentment of her feeling about a thing she did not understand. After all—as before, he quickly made this excuse for her—what more natural than that she should take on the feeling of these people she was thrown with, particularly when they were so very kindly in their reception of her?
"Dear," he began again, "I saw Ruth this afternoon. She seems so alone there. She's gone through such—such hard things. It's a pretty sad homecoming for her. I'm going over there again this evening, and, Amy dear, I do so want you to go with me."
Amy did not reply. He had not looked at her after he began speaking—not wanting to lose either his courage or his temper in seeing that stiffening in her. He did not look at her now, even though she did not speak.
"I want you to go, Amy. I ask you to. I want it—you don't know how much. I'm terribly sorry for Ruth. I knew her very well, we were very close friends. Now that she is here, and in trouble—and so lonely—I want to take my wife to see her."
As even then she remained silent, he turned to her. She sat very straight; red spots burned in her cheeks and there was a light in her eyes he had never seen there before. She pushed back her chair excitedly. "And may I ask,"—her voice was high, tight,—"if you see nothing insulting to your wife in this—proposal?"
For an instant he just stared at her. "Insulting?" he faltered. "I—I—" He stopped, helpless, and helplessly sat looking at her, sitting erect, breathing fast, face and eyes aflame with anger. And in that moment something in his heart fell back; a desire that had been dear to him, a thing that had seemed so beautiful and so necessary, somehow just crept back where it could not be so much hurt. At the sight of her, hard, scornful, so sure in her hardness, that high desire of his love that she share his feeling fell back. And then to his disappointment was added anger for Ruth; through the years anger against so many people had leaped up in him because of their hardness to Ruth, that, as if of itself, it leaped up against Amy now.
"No," he said, his voice hard now too, "I must say I see nothing insulting in asking you to go with me to see Ruth Holland!"
"Oh, you don't!" she cried. "A woman living with another woman's husband! Why, this very afternoon I was with the wife of the man that woman is living with!—she is the woman I would meet! And you can ask me—your wife—to go and see a woman who turned her back on society—on decency—a woman her own family cast out, and all decent people turn away from." She paused, struggling, unable to keep her dignity and yet say the things rushing up to be said.
He had grown red, as he always did when people talked that way about Ruth. "Of course,"—he made himself say it quietly—"she isn't those things to me, you know. She's—quite other things to me."