It was apparent that Edith had been crying. She and her mother were gracious to Amy, but there was a new constraint. She felt uncomfortable. When they were alone Edith broke out and told her how she was just sick at heart about Ruth. Deane had been there that morning urging her to go and see Ruth—instantly there was all anew that tightening up that held her from Deane, that feeling against him and against this Ruth Holland that was as if something virulent had been poured into her blood, changing her whole system. Edith cried as she told how Deane and her mother had quarreled because he felt so strongly on the subject, and didn't seem able to understand her mother's standpoint. Then, she too wanting to set herself right with herself, she went over the whole story—the shock to her, how it had hurt her ideal of friendship, had even seemed to take something from the sanctity of her own marriage. She silenced something within herself in recounting the wrong done her, fortified herself in repeating the things she had from her mother about one's not being free, about what the individual owed to society.
Amy went home in a turmoil of resentment against her husband. It was hard to hold back the angry tears. A nice position he was putting himself in—going about the town pleading for this woman whom nobody would take in!—estranging his friends—yes, probably hurting his practice. And why? Why was he so wrought up about it? Why was he making a regular business of going about fighting her battles? Well, one thing it showed! It showed how much consideration he had for his own wife. When she came in sight of their house it was harder than ever to hold back the tears of mortification, of hot resentment. She had been so sure she was going to be perfectly happy in that house! Now already her husband was turning away from her—humiliating her—showing how much he thought of another woman, and such a woman! She did not know what to do with the way she felt, did not know how to hold from the surface the ugly things that surged through her, possessed her. Until now she had had nothing but adulation from love. A pretty, petted girl she had formed that idea of pretty women in youth that it was for men to give love and women graciously to accept it. For her vanity to be hurt by a man who had roused her passion turned that passion to fury against him and made it seem that a great wrong had been done her.
As she approached she saw that Deane was standing before the house talking to a woman in a vegetable wagon. He had one foot up on the spoke of the wheel and was talking more earnestly than it seemed one would be talking to a vegetable woman. Doubtless she was one of his patients. As she came up he said: "Oh, Amy, I want you to know Mrs. Herman."
She stiffened; his tone in introducing her to a woman of what she thought of as the lower classes seeming just a new evidence of his inadequate valuation of her.
"Your husband and I went to school together," said Mrs. Herman, pleasantly, but as if explaining.
"Oh?" murmured Amy.
Deane abruptly moved back from the wagon. "Well, you do that, Annie. Ruth would love to see you, I know."
So that was it! She turned away with a stiff little nod to the woman in the wagon. Always the same thing!—urging Tom, Dick and Harry to go and see that woman!—taking up with a person like this, introducing his wife in that intimate way to a woman who peddled vegetables just because she was willing to go and see Ruth Holland! She didn't know that she had to stand such things!—she didn't know that she would. She guessed she could show him that she wasn't going to play second fiddle to that Ruth Holland!
Deane came to the door of the room where she was taking off her hat. Her fingers were trembling so that she could scarcely get the pins. "That little woman you were so chilly to is a pretty fine sort, Amy," he said incisively.
"Because she is going to see Ruth Holland?" she retorted with an excited laugh.