"She is very lonely, Deane says," said Edith tremulously.
Mrs. Lawrence was threading a needle. "I presume so," she answered quietly.
Deane felt the blood rising in him. Somehow that quiet reply angered him as no sharp retort could have done. He turned to Edith, rather pointedly leaving her mother out. "Well," he asked bluntly, "will you go?"
Edith's eyes widened. She looked frightened. She stole a look at her mother, who had serenely begun upon her embroidery.
"Why, Deane!" laughed the mother, as if tolerantly waving aside a preposterous proposal, "how absurd! Of course Edith won't go! How could she? Why should she?"
He made no reply, fearing to let himself express the things which—disappointed—he was feeling.
Mrs. Lawrence looked up. "If you will just cast your mind back," she said, her voice remaining pleasant though there was a sting in it now, "to the way Ruth treated Edith, I think it will come home to you, Deane, that you are asking a rather absurd thing."
"But Edith says,"—he made a big effort to speak as quietly as she did—"that that personal part of it is all right with her. She says that she would really like to go and see Ruth, but doesn't think she can—on account of society."
Mrs. Lawrence flushed a little at his tone on that last, but she seemed quite unruffled as she asked: "And you see no point in that?"
He had sat down on the railing of the porch. He leaned back against a pillar, turning a little away from them as he said with a laugh not free of bitterness: "I don't believe I quite get this idea about society." Abruptly he turned back to Mrs. Lawrence. "What is it? A collection of individuals for mutual benefit and self-protection, I gather. Protection against what? Their own warmest selves? The most real things in them?"