Ted looked at her wonderingly; but the hardness had gone out of his look. "But what are you going to do, Ruth?" he asked gently.
"I don't know yet. I've got to find out."
"You must see that I can't help but worry about it," he went on. "Going so far away--to a place absolutely unknown to you--where I'm afraid it will be so much harder than you think."
She did not answer him, looking off to that eastern range she was going to cross, as if the mountains could help her to hold on to her own feeling against the doubts he was trying to throw around her.
"You see, Ruth," he went on, as if feeling his way, not wanting to hurt her, "what has been may make it hard to go on. You can't tell. You'll never know--never be sure. Old things may come up to spoil new ones for you. That's what I'm so afraid of. That's what it seems you aren't seeing. You would be so much--safer--to stay with Stuart."
She turned to him with a little laugh, her lashes wet. "Yes, Ted dear, I suppose I would. But I never did seem to stay where I was safest--did I?"
"Don't worry about me, Ted," she said just as they were coming into town. "I'm going to take some of father's money--yes, yes, I know it isn't a great deal, but enough for a little while, till I get my bearings--and I'm going to make things come alive for me again. I'm not through yet, that's all. I could have stayed with life gone dead; it would have been safer, as you say. But you see I'm not through yet, Ted--I guess that's the secret of it all. I want more life--more things from life. And I'm going to New York just because it will be so completely new--so completely beginning new--and because it's the center of so many living things. And it's such a wonderful time, Ted. It seems to me the war is going to make a new world--a whole new way of looking at things. It's as if a lot of old things, old ideas, had been melted, and were fluid now, and were to be shaped anew. That's the way it seems to me, and that makes me the more eager to get some things from life that I haven't had. I've been shut in with my own experience. If I stayed on here I'd be shut in with my own dead experiences. I want to go on! I can't stop here--that's all. And we have to find our way for going on. We must find our own way, Ted, even," she choked, "though what we see as the way may seem a wild goose chase to some one we love. I'll tell you why I'm going to New York," she flashed with sudden defiance. "I'm going because I want to!"