But he felt her waiting for what she wanted to know and so with an effort he began: "Why, you see, dear, Ruth--it was pretty tough for Ruth. Things didn't go right for her--not as they did for Cora and Edith and the girls of her crowd. She--" Something in the calm of Amy's waiting made it curiously hard to say, "Ruth couldn't marry the man she cared for." "Why not!" she asked dispassionately. "Why, because it wasn't possible," he answered a little sharply. "She couldn't marry him because he wasn't divorced," he said bluntly then. Amy's deep gray eyes, they had seemed so unperturbed, so unsympathetically calm, were upon him now in a queer, steady way. He felt himself flushing. "Wasn't divorced?" she said with a little laugh. "Is that a way of saying he was married?" He nodded. "She cared for a man who was married to someone else?" she asked with rising voice. Again he only nodded, feeling incapable, when Amy looked at him like that, of saying the things he would like to be saying for Ruth. Abruptly she drew her hair away. "And you can sympathize with--_like_--a person who would do that?" "I certainly both sympathize with and like Ruth." That had come quick and sharp, and then suddenly he felt it all wrong that a thing which had gone so deep into his own life should be coming to Amy like this, that she should be taking the attitude of the town against his friend, against his own feeling. He blamed his way of putting it, telling himself it was absurd to expect her to understand a bald statement like that. At that moment he realized it was very important she should understand; not only Ruth, but something in himself--something counting for much in himself would be shut out if she did not understand. It made his voice gentle as he began: "Amy, don't you know that just to be told of a thing may make it seem very different from what the thing really was? Seeing a thing from the outside is so different from living through it. Won't you reserve judgment about Ruth--she is my friend and I hate to see her unfairly judged--until some time when I can tell it better?" "Why have _you_ so much to do with it? Why is it so important I do not--judge her?" Amy's sweetness, that soft quality that had been dear to him seemed to have tightened into a hard shrewdness as she asked: "How did _you_ happen to know it all from within?" He pushed his chair back from her and settled into it wearily. "Why, because she was my friend, dear. I was in her confidence." "I don't think I'd be very proud of being in the confidence of a woman who ran away with another woman's husband!" Her hostile voice fanned the old anger that had so many times flamed when people were speaking hostilely of Ruth. But he managed to say quietly: "But you see you don't know much about it yet, Amy." He was facing her mirror and what he saw in it made him lean forward, his arms about her, with an impulsive: "Sweetheart, we're not going to quarrel, are we?"