As she approached she saw that Deane was standing before the house talking to a woman in a vegetable wagon. He had one foot up on the spoke of the wheel and was talking more earnestly than it seemed one would be talking to a vegetable woman. Doubtless she was one of his patients. As she came up he said: "Oh, Amy, I want you to know Mrs. Herman."
She stiffened; his tone in introducing her to a woman of what she thought of as the lower classes seeming just a new evidence of his inadequate valuation of her.
"Your husband and I went to school together," said Mrs. Herman, pleasantly, but as if explaining.
Deane abruptly moved back from the wagon. "Well, you do that, Annie. Ruth would love to see you, I know."
So _that_ was it! She turned away with a stiff little nod to the woman in the wagon. Always the same thing!--urging Tom, Dick and Harry to go and see that woman!--taking up with a person like this, introducing his wife in that intimate way to a woman who peddled vegetables just because she was willing to go and see Ruth Holland! She didn't know that she had to stand such things!--she didn't know that she _would_. She guessed she could show him that she wasn't going to play second fiddle to that Ruth Holland!
Deane came to the door of the room where she was taking off her hat. Her fingers were trembling so that she could scarcely get the pins. "That little woman you were so chilly to is a pretty fine sort, Amy," he said incisively.
"Because she is going to see Ruth Holland?" she retorted with an excited laugh.
"Oh, you were pretty stand-offish before you knew that," he answered coolly.
Vanity smarting from deeper hurts made her answer, haughtily: "I'm rather inexperienced, you know, in meeting people of that class."
In his heart too there were deeper disappointments than this touched. "Well, I must say--" he began hotly, "I think if I felt as snobbish as that I'd try pretty hard to conceal it!"
Amy was carefully putting away her hat; she had an appearance of cold composure, of a sense of superiority. It was because she wanted to keep that that she did not speak. The things within would so completely have destroyed it.
"I guess you don't understand, Amy," said Deane, quieted by her silence; "if you knew all about Annie Morris I think you'd see she is a woman worth meeting." Thinking of his talk with Edith and her mother that morning, he added, a good deal of feeling breaking into his voice: "A good sight more so than some of the people you are meeting!"