She tried to forget the things that were coming back to her--how Mildred would gleefully hold up her hands to have her mittens put on when she and Edith were about to take her out, and tried too to turn the conversation--breaking out with something about Mrs. Herman's children. But it became apparent that Mildred was not to be put off. Everything Ruth would call up to hold her off she somehow forced around to an approach for what she wanted to say. And then it came abruptly, as if she were tired of trying to lead up to it. "I've been wanting to see you--Ruth," she hesitated over the name, but brought it out bravely, and it occurred to Ruth then that Mildred had not known how to address her. "When I heard you were here," she added, "I was determined you shouldn't get away without my seeing you." Ruth looked at her with a little smile, moved, in spite of herself, by the impetuousness of the girl's tone, by something real that broke through the worldly little manner. "I don't feel as the rest of them do." She flushed and said it hurriedly, a little tremulously; and yet there was something direct and honest in her eyes, as if she were going to say it whether it seemed nice taste or not. It reached Ruth, went through her self-protective determination not to be reached. Her heart went out to Mildred's youth, to this appeal from youth, moved by the freshness and realness beneath that surface artificiality, saddened by this defiance of one who, it seemed, could so little understand how big was the thing she defied, who seemed so much the product of the thing she scorned, so dependent on what she was apparently in the mood to flout. "I don't know that they are to be blamed for their feeling, Mildred," she answered quietly. "Oh, yes, they are!" hotly contended the girl. "It's because they don't understand. It's because they _can't_ understand!" The reins had fallen loose in her hand; the whip sagged; she drooped--that stiff, chic little manner gone. She turned a timid, trusting face to Ruth--a light shining through troubled eyes. "It's love that counts, isn't it,--Ruth?" she asked, half humble, half defiant. It swept Ruth's heart of everything but sympathy. Her hand closed over Mildred's. "What is it, dear?" she asked. "Just what is it?" Mildred's eyes filled. Ruth could understand that so well--what sympathy meant to a feeling shut in, a feeling the whole world seemed against. "It's with me--as it was with you," the girl answered very low and simply. "It's--like that." Ruth shut her eyes for an instant; they were passing something fragrant; it came to her--an old fragrance--like something out of things past; a robin was singing; she opened her eyes and looked at Mildred, saw the sunshine finding gold in the girl's hair. The sadness of it--of youth and suffering, of pain in a world of beauty, that reach of pain into youth, into love, made it hard to speak. "I'm sorry, dear," was all she could say.