"But you see,"—he could feel her reaching out, as if thinking she must, to the things that had been said to her, was conscious of her mother's thinking pushing on hers as she fumbled, "but one isn't free, Deane. Society has to protect itself. What might not happen—if it didn't?"
He tried to restrain what he wanted to say to that—keep cool, wise, and say the things that would get Edith. He was sure that Edith wanted to be had; her eyes asked him to overthrow those things that had been fastened on her, to free her so that the simple, human approach was the only one there was to it, justify her in believing one dared be as kind, as natural and simple and real as one wanted to be. He was sure that in Edith's heart love for her friend was more real than any sense of duty to society.
"But after all what is society, Edith?" he began quietly. "Just a collection of individuals, isn't it? Why must it be so much harder than the individuals comprising it? If it is that—then there's something wrong with it, wouldn't you think?"
He looked around at the sound of a screen door closing. Edith's mother had stepped out on the porch. He knew by her startled look, her quick, keen glance at him, that she had heard his last words. She stepped forward holding up her hands in mock dismay, with a laughing: "What a large, solemn issue for an early morning conversation!"
Deane tried to laugh but he was not good at dissembling and he was finding it hard to conceal his annoyance at the interruption. Talking to Mrs. Lawrence was very different from talking to Edith. Edith, against her own loving impulses, tried to think what she thought she ought to think; Mrs. Lawrence had hardened into the things she thought should be thought, and at once less loving and more intelligent than Edith, she was fixed where her daughter was uncertain, complacent where Edith was troubled. She was one of those women who, very kind to people they accept, have no tendrils of kindness running out to those whom they do not approve. Her qualities of heart did not act outside the circle of her endorsement. With the exception of Ruth's brother Cyrus, no one in the town had been harder about her than Edith's mother. He had all the time felt that, let alone, Edith would have gone back to Ruth.
He had risen and pulled up a chair for Mrs. Lawrence and now stood there fumbling with his hat, as if about to leave. It seemed to him he might as well.
"Why, my dears!" exclaimed the older woman with a sort of light dryness, "pray don't let me feel I have broken up a philosophic discussion."
"Deane was asking me to go and see Ruth, mother," said Edith, simply and not without dignity.
He saw her flush, her quick look up at him, and then the slight tightening of her lips.
"And doesn't it occur to Deane," she asked pleasantly, "that that is rather a strange thing to ask of you?"