"But of course I'm a pretty poor sort, not worth making a fight for, or it wouldn't be like this. And--for that matter--what's the difference? Lives aren't counting for much these days--men who _are_ the right sort going down by the thousands, by the hundred of thousands, so what--for heaven's sake--does it matter about me? "I wish I could see you! "I'm glad for you about the divorce. I believe the case comes up this April term, so it may be all over by the time you get this letter. Pretty late in coming, and I suppose it must seem a good deal of a mockery--getting it now--but maybe it will help some for the future, make you feel more comfortable, and I'm awfully glad. "Funny about it, isn't it? I wonder what made her do it! I was called there this winter, maid sick--miscarriage--and Mrs. Williams puzzled me. Didn't turn the girl out, awfully decent to her. I would have supposed she would have been quite the other way. And now this. Queer, don't you think? "Write to me sometimes, Ruth. Sometimes write to me what you're thinking about. Maybe it will stir me up. Write to me to take a brace and get out of this town! If you went for me hard enough, called me all the insulting names you could think of, and told me a living dead man was the most cowardly and most disgusting object cluttering up the earth, you might get a rise out of me. You're the one could do it, if it can be done. "One thing I _do_ know--writing this has made me want like blazes to see you! "DEANE." * * * * * Ruth sat there in the arm of a low willow, her hands resting upon Deane's letter, her eyes closed, the faint breath of coming spring upon her face. She was tired and very sad. She was thinking of Deane's life, of her own life, of the way one seemed mocked. She wished that Deane were there; she could talk to him and she would like to talk. His letter moved something in her, something that had long seemed locked in stirred a little. Her feeling about life had seemed a thing frozen within her. Now the feeling that there was still this open channel between her and Deane was as a thawing, an outlet. She thought of her last talk with Deane, of their walk together that day, almost a year before, when he came to see her at Annie's, the very day she was starting back West. She had felt anything but locked in that day. There was that triumphant sense of openness to life, the joy of new interest in it, of zest for it. And then she came back West, to Stuart, and somehow the radiance went, courage ebbed, it came to seem that life was all fixed, almost as if life, in the real sense, was over. That sense of having failed, having been inadequate to her own feeling, struck her down to a wretched powerlessness. And so routine, hard work, bitter cold, loneliness, that sense of the cruelty of life which the sternness of the country gave--those things had been able to take her; it was because something had gone dead in her.