It made Edith seem very young to her. And in her negligee, her hair down, she looked childish. Her pleasure in the plans for her wedding seemed like a child's pleasure. It seemed that hurting her in it would be horribly like spoiling a child's party. Edith's flushed face, her sparkling eyes, her little excited, happy laugh made it impossible for Ruth to speak the words she had come to say.
For three days it went on like that: going ahead with the festivities, constantly thinking she would tell Edith as soon as they got home from this place or that, waiting until this or that person had gone, then dumb before the childish quality of Edith's excitement, deciding to wait until the next morning because Edith was either too happy or too tired to talk to her that night. That ingenuousness of her friend's pleasure in her wedding made Ruth feel, not only older, but removed from her by experience. Those days of her own frozen misery were days of tenderness for Edith, that tenderness which one well along the road of living feels for the one just setting feet upon the path.
She was never able to understand how she did get through those days. It was an almost unbelievable thing that, knowing, she was able, up to the very last, to go right on with the old things, was able to talk to people as if nothing were different, to laugh, to dance. There were times when something seemed frozen in her heart and she could go on doing the usual things mechanically, just because she knew so well how to do them; then there were other times when every smallest thing was stabbed through and through with the consciousness that she would not be doing it again. And yet even then, she could go on, could appear the same. They were days of a terrible power for bearing pain. When the people of the town looked back to it, recalling everything they could about Ruth Holland in those days, some of them, remembering a tenderness in her manner with Edith, talked of what a hypocrite she was, while others satisfied themselves of her utter heartlessness in remembering her gaiety.
It was two days before the wedding when she saw that she was not going to be able to tell Edith and got the idea of telling Edith's mother. Refusing to let herself consider what she would say when she began upon it, she went over there early that morning--Edith would not be up.