Her affairs as a girl went on just the same; the life on the surface did not change. She continued as Ruth Holland--the girl who went to parties with the boys of her own set, one of her particular little circle of girls, the chum of Edith Lawrence, the girl Deane Franklin liked best. But a life grew underneath that--all the time growing, crowding. She appeared to remain a girl after passion had swept her over into womanhood. To be living through the most determining, most intensifying experience of life while she appeared only to be resting upon the surface was the harassing thing she went through in those years before reality came crashing through pretence and disgrace brought relief. She talked to but one person in those years. That was Deane. The night he told her that he loved her she let him see. That was more than a year after the night Stuart Williams took her home from that last rehearsal; Deane was through school now and had come home to practice medicine. She had felt all along that once he was at home for good she might have to tell Deane; not alone because he would interfere with her meetings with Stuart, but because it seemed she could not bear the further strain of pretending with him. And somehow she would particularly hate pretending with Deane. Though the night she did let him see it was not that there was any determination for doing so, but because things had become too tense that night and she had no power to go on dissembling. It began in irritation at him, the vicious irritation that springs out against the person who upsets a plan he knows nothing about, and cannot be told of. She had come in from an errand down town and was about to dress hurriedly to go over to Edith's for dinner. She was going to make some excuse for getting away from there early and would have an hour with Stuart, one of those stolen hours that often crowded, agitated, a number of the hours before it, one of those hours of happiness when fear always stood right there, but when joy had a marvellous power to glow in an atmosphere of ugly things. A few nights before she had tried to arrange one of those times, and just as she was about to leave the house, saying some vague thing about running in somewhere--there was no strict surveillance on members of the Holland household--a friend who had been very ill and was just beginning to go about had come to see her and she had been obliged to sit there through the hour she had been living for, striving to crowd down what she was feeling and appear delighted that her friend was able to be about, chatting lightly of inconsequential things while she could think of nothing but Stuart waiting for her, had had to smile while she wanted to sob in the fury of disappointed passion.