Her tone made no opening for him. "I thought a great deal of her," he said after a moment.
"Yes, I gathered that too." She said it dryly, and smiled just a little. He was more conscious than ever of being tired, of its being hard to tell about Ruth.
"I gathered," said Amy, still faintly smiling, though, her voice went a trifle higher, "that you thought more of her—" she hesitated, then amended—"think more of her—than the rest of them do."
He answered simply: "Yes, I believe that's so. Though Edith used to care a great deal for Ruth," he added meditatively.
"Well, what did she do?" Amy demanded impatiently. "What is it?"
For a moment his cheek went down to her soft hair that was all around her, in a surge of love for its softness, a swift, deep gratitude for her loveliness. He wanted to rest there, letting that, for the time, shut out all else, secure in new happiness and forgetting old hurts.
But he felt her waiting for what she wanted to know and so with an effort he began: "Why, you see, dear, Ruth—it was pretty tough for Ruth. Things didn't go right for her—not as they did for Cora and Edith and the girls of her crowd. She—" Something in the calm of Amy's waiting made it curiously hard to say, "Ruth couldn't marry the man she cared for."
"Why not!" she asked dispassionately.
"Why, because it wasn't possible," he answered a little sharply. "She couldn't marry him because he wasn't divorced," he said bluntly then.
Amy's deep gray eyes, they had seemed so unperturbed, so unsympathetically calm, were upon him now in a queer, steady way. He felt himself flushing. "Wasn't divorced?" she said with a little laugh. "Is that a way of saying he was married?"