With a little sigh Cora leaned back in the luxurious corner. "We're not free to do what we might like to do in this life," she said, looking gravely at Amy and speaking as one actuated by something larger than personal feeling. "Too many people are associated with me for me to go and see Ruth--as, for my own part, I'd gladly do. You see it's even closer than being related to Marion. Cyrus Holland,--Ruth's brother--married into my family too. Funny, isn't it?" she laughed at Amy's stare. "Yes, Cyrus Holland married a second cousin of Stuart Williams' wife." "Why--" gasped Amy, "it's positively weird, isn't it?" "Things are pretty much mixed up in this world," Cora went on, speaking with that good-natured sophistication which appealed to Amy as worldly. "I think one reason Cy was so bitter against Ruth, and kept the whole family so, was the way it broke into his own plans. He was in love with Louise at the time Ruth left; of course all her kith and kin--being also Marion's--were determined she should not marry a Holland. Cy thought he had lost her, but after a time, as long as no one was quite so bitter against Ruth as he, the opposition broke down a little--enough for Louise to ride over it. Oh, yes, in these small towns everybody's somehow mixed up with everyone else," she laughed. "And of course," she went on more gravely, "that is where it is hard to answer the people who seem so hard about Ruth. It isn't just one's self, or even just one's family--though it broke them pretty completely, you know; but a thing like that reaches out into so many places--hurts so many lives." "Yes," said Amy, "it does." She was thinking of her own life, of how it was clouding her happiness. "One has to admit," said Cora, in the tone of summing it all up, "that just taking one's own happiness is thorough selfishness. Society as a whole is greater than the individual, isn't it?" That seemed to Amy the heart of it. She felt herself as one within society, herself faithful to it and guarding it against all who would do it harm; hard to the traitor, not because of any personal feeling--she wished to make that clear to herself--but because society as a whole demanded that hardness. After she had bade Cora good-by and as she was about to open the door of the house Deane had prepared for her, she told herself that it was a matter of taking the larger view. She was pleased with the phrase; it seemed to clear her own feeling of any possible charge of smallness. CHAPTER FOURTEEN