"Oh, you don't!" she cried. "A woman living with another woman's husband! Why, this very afternoon I was with the wife of the man that woman is living with!--_she_ is the woman I would meet! And you can ask me--your wife--to go and see a woman who turned her back on society--on decency--a woman her own family cast out, and all decent people turn away from." She paused, struggling, unable to keep her dignity and yet say the things rushing up to be said. He had grown red, as he always did when people talked that way about Ruth. "Of course,"--he made himself say it quietly--"she isn't those things to me, you know. She's--quite other things to me." "I'd like to know what she _is_ to you!" Amy cried. "It's very strange--your standing up for her against the whole town!" He did not reply; it was impossible to tell Amy, when she was like this, what Ruth had been--was--to him. She looked at him as he sat there silent. And this was the man she had married!--a man who could treat her like this, asking her to go and see a woman who wasn't respectable--why, who was as far from respectable as a woman could be! This was the man for whom she had left her mother and father--and a home better than this home certainly,--yes, and that other man who had wanted her and who had so much more to offer! _He_ respected her. He would never ask her to go and see a woman who wasn't decent! But she had married for love; had given up all those other things that she might have love. And now.... Her throat tightened and it was hard to hold back tears. And then suddenly she wanted to go over to Deane, slip down beside him, put her arms around him, tell him that she loved him and ask him to please tell her that he loved her. But there was so strange an expression on his face; it checked that warm, loving impulse, holding her where she was, hard. What was he thinking about--_that woman_? He had so strange a look. She did not believe it had anything to do with her. No, he had forgotten her. It was this other woman. Why, he was in love with her--of course! He had always been in love with her. Because it seemed the idea would break her heart, because she could not bear it, it was scoffingly that she threw out: "You were in love with her, I suppose? You've always been in love with her, haven't you?" "Yes, Amy," he answered, "I was in love with Ruth. I loved her--at any rate, I sorrowed for her--until the day I met you." His voice was slow and sad; the whole sadness of it all, all the sadness of a world in which men and women loved and hurt each other seemed closing in around him. He did not seem able to rise out of it, to go out to her; it was as if his new disappointment brought back all the hurt of old ones.