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Title: The Real Adventure

Author: Henry Kitchell Webster

Illustrator: Raymond Moreau Crosby

Release date: March 16, 2005 [eBook #15384]
Most recently updated: December 14, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15384

Credits: E-text prepared by Rick Niles, Gene Smethers, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed
Proofreading Team

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE REAL
ADVENTURE ***

E-text prepared by Rick Niles, Gene Smethers,
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team

"We can't talk here," he said.
"We must go elsewhere."

THE REAL ADVENTURE
A Novel

By

HENRY KITCHELL WEBSTER

ILLUSTRATED BY

R. M. CROSBY

INDIANAPOLIS

THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY

PUBLISHERS

Serial Version

1915

THE RIDGWAY COMPANY

Complete Version

1916

THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY

PRESS OF

BRAUNWORTH & CO.

BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS

BROOKLYN, N.Y.

CONTENTS

BOOK I

THE GREAT ILLUSION

CHAPTER I A Point of Departure
CHAPTER II Beginning an Adventure
CHAPTER III Frederica's Plan and What Happened to It
CHAPTER IV Rosalind Stanton Doesn't Disappear
CHAPTER V The Second Encounter
CHAPTER VI The Big Horse
CHAPTER VII How It Struck Portia
CHAPTER VIII Rodney's Experiment
CHAPTER IX After Breakfast

BOOK II

LOVE AND THE WORLD

CHAPTER I The Princess Cinderella
CHAPTER II The First Question and an Answer to It

CHAPTER III Where Did Rose Come In
CHAPTER IV Long Circuits and Short
CHAPTER V Rodney Smiled
CHAPTER VI The Damascus Road
CHAPTER VII How the Pattern Was Cut
CHAPTER VIII A Birthday
CHAPTER IX A Defeat
CHAPTER X The Door That Was to Open
CHAPTER XI An Illustration
CHAPTER XII What Harriet Did
CHAPTER XIII Fate Plays a Joke
CHAPTER XIV The Dam Gives Way
CHAPTER XV The Only Remedy
CHAPTER XVI Rose Opens the Door

BOOK III

THE WORLD ALONE

CHAPTER I The Length of a Thousand Yards
CHAPTER II The Evening and the Morning
Were the First Day
CHAPTER III Rose Keeps the Path
CHAPTER IV The Girl With the Bad Voice
CHAPTER V Mrs. Goldsmith's Taste
CHAPTER VI A Business Proposition
CHAPTER VII The End of a Fixed Idea

CHAPTER VIII Success—and a Recognition
CHAPTER IX The Man and the Director
CHAPTER X The Voice of the World
CHAPTER XI The Short Circuit Again
CHAPTER XII "I'm All Alone"
CHAPTER XIII Frederica's Paradox
CHAPTER XIV The Miry Way
CHAPTER XV In Flight
CHAPTER XVI Anti-Climax
CHAPTER XVII The End of the Tour
CHAPTER XVIII The Conquest of Centropolis

BOOK IV

THE REAL ADVENTURE

CHAPTER I The Tune Changes
CHAPTER II A Broken Parallel
CHAPTER III Friends
CHAPTER IV Couleur-de-rose
CHAPTER V The Beginning

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

"We can't talk here," he said. "We must go elsewhere."
At sight of him she flashed to her feet.
"Oh, my dear! I didn't know!"
Barry and Jane gazed at her wide-eyed.
"I want a job in the chorus."
"It isn't quite so much your style, is it?"
"Don't you know that that was Rose Aldrich?"
"What earthly thing does it matter whose fault it is?"
"You're a good friend," she said.

BOOK ONE

The Great Illusion

CHAPTER I

A POINT OF DEPARTURE

"Indeed," continued the professor, glancing demurely down at his notes,
"if one were the editor of a column of—er advice to young girls, such as I
believe is to be found, along with the household hints and the dress patterns,
on the ladies' page of most of our newspapers—if one were the editor of
such a column, he might crystallize the remarks I have been making this
morning into a warning—never marry a man with a passion for principles."
It drew a laugh, of course. Professorial jokes never miss fire. But the girl
didn't laugh. She came to with a start—she had been staring out the window
—and wrote, apparently, the fool thing down in her note-book. It was the
only note she had made in thirty-five minutes.
All of his brilliant exposition of the paradox of Rousseau and Robespierre
(he was giving a course on the French Revolution), the strange and yet
inevitable fact that the softest, most sentimental, rose-scented religion ever
invented, should have produced, through its most thoroughly infatuated
disciple, the ghastliest reign of terror that ever shocked the world; his
masterly character study of the "sea-green incorruptible," too humane to
swat a fly, yet capable of sending half of France to the guillotine in order
that the half that was left might believe unanimously in the rights of man;
all this the girl had let go by unheard, in favor, apparently, of the drone of a
street piano, which came in through the open window on the prematurely
warm March wind. Of all his philosophizing, there was not a pen-track to
mar the virginity of the page she had opened her note-book to when the
lecture began.
And then, with a perfectly serious face, she had written down his silly
little joke about advice to young girls.

There was no reason in the world why she should be The Girl. There
were fifteen or twenty of them in the class along with about as many men.
And, partly because there was no reason for his paying any special attention
to her, it annoyed him frightfully that he did.
She was good-looking, of course—a rather boyishly splendid young
creature of somewhere about twenty, with a heap of hair that had, in spite of
its rather commonplace chestnut color, a sort of electric vitality about it.
She was slightly prognathous, which gave a humorous lift to her otherwise
sensible nose. She had good straight-looking, expressive eyes, too, and a
big, wide, really beautiful mouth, with square white teeth in it, which, when
she smiled or yawned—and she yawned more luxuriously than any girl who
had ever sat in his classes—exerted a sort of hypnotic effect on him. All
that, however, left unexplained the quality she had of making you, whatever
she did, irresistibly aware of her. And, conversely, unaware of every one
else about her. A bit of campus slang occurred to him as quite literally
applicable to her. She had all the rest of them faded.
It wasn't, apparently, an effect she tried for. He had to acquit her of that.
Not even, perhaps, one that she was conscious of. When she came early to
one of his lectures—it didn't happen often—the men, showed a practical
unanimity in trying to choose seats near by, or at least where they could see
her. But while this didn't distress her at all—they were welcome to look if
they liked—she struck no attitudes for their benefit. A sort of breezy
indifference—he selected that phrase finally as the best description of her
attitude toward all of them, including himself. When she was late, as she
usually was, she slid unostentatiously into the back row—if possible at the
end where she could look out the window. But for three minutes after she
had come in, he knew he might as well have stopped his lecture and begun
reciting the Greek alphabet. She was, in the professor's mind, the final
argument against coeducation. Her name was Rosalind Stanton, but his
impression was that they called her Rose.
The bell rang out in the corridor. He dismissed the class and began
stacking up his notes. Then:
"Miss Stanton," he said.

She detached herself from the stream that was moving toward the door,
and with a good-humored look of inquiry about her very expressive
eyebrows, came toward him. And then he wished he hadn't called her. She
had spoiled his lecture—a perfectly good lecture—and his impulse had
been to remonstrate with her. But the moment he saw her coming, he knew
he wasn't going to be able to do it. It wasn't her fault that her teeth had
hypnotized him, and her hair tangled his ideas.
"This is an idiotic question," he said, as she paused before his desk, "but
did you get anything at all out of my lecture except my bit of facetious
advice to young girls about to marry?"
She flushed a little (a girl like that hadn't any right to flush; it ought to be
against the college regulations), drew her brows together in a puzzled sort
of way, and then, with her wide, boyish, good-humored mouth, she smiled.
"I didn't know it was facetious," she said. "It struck me as pretty good.
But—I'm awfully sorry if you thought me inattentive. You see, mother
brought us all up on the Social Contract and The Age of Reason, things like
that, and I didn't put it down because ..."
"I see," he said. "I beg your pardon."
She smiled, cheerfully begged his and assured him she'd try to do better.
Another girl who'd been waiting to speak to the professor, perceiving that
their conversation was at an end, came and stood beside her at the desk—a
scrawny girl with an eager voice, and a question she wanted to ask about
Robespierre; and for some reason or other, Rosalind Stanton's valedictory
smile seemed to include a consciousness of this other girl—a consciousness
of a contrast. It might not have been any more than that, but somehow, it
left the professor feeling that he had given himself away.
He was particularly polite to the other girl, because his impulse was to act
so very differently.
There is nothing cloistral about the University of Chicago except its
architecture. The presence of a fat abbot, or a lady prioress in the corridor
outside the recitation room would have fitted in admirably with the look of

the warm gray walls and the carven pointed arches of the window and door
casements, the blackened oak of the doors themselves.
On the other hand, the appearance of the person whom Rose found
waiting for her out there, afforded the piquant effect of contrast. Or would
have done so, had the spectacle of him in that very occupation not been so
familiar.
He was a varsity half-back, a gigantic blond young man in a blue serge
suit. He said, "Hello, Rose," and she said, "Hello, Harry." And he heaved
himself erect from the wall he had been leaning against and reached out an
immense hand to absorb the little stack of note-books she carried. She
ignored the gesture, and when he asked for them said she'd carry them
herself. There was a sort of strategic advantage in having your own note-
books under your own arm—a fact which no one appreciated better than the
half-back himself.
He looked a little hurt. "Sore about something?" he asked.
She smiled widely and said, "Not a bit."
"I didn't mean at me necessarily," he explained, and referred to the fact
that the professor had detained her after he had dismissed the class. "What'd
he try to do—call you down?"
There was indignation in the young man's voice—a hint of the protector
aroused—of possible retribution.
She grinned again. "Oh, you needn't go back and kill him," she said.
He blushed to the ears. "I'm sorry," he observed stiltedly, "if I appear
ridiculous." But she went on smiling.
"Don't you care," she said. "Everybody's ridiculous in March. You're
ridiculous, I'm ridiculous, he"—she nodded along the corridor—"he's
plumb ridiculous."
He wasn't wholly appeased. It was rather with an air of resignation that he
held the door for her to go out by. They strolled along in silence until they

rounded the corner of the building. Here, ceremoniously, he fell back,
walked around behind her and came up on the outside. She glanced up and
asked him, incomprehensibly, to walk on the other side, the way they had
been. He wanted to know why. This was where he belonged.
"You don't belong there," she told him, "if I want you the other way. And
I do."
He heaved a sigh, and said "Women!" under his breath. Mutabile semper!
No matter how much you knew about them, they remained
incomprehensible. Their whims passed explanation. He was getting
downright sulky.
As a matter of fact, he did her an injustice. There was a valid reason for
her wanting him to walk on the other side. What gave the appearance of
pure caprice to her request was just her womanly dislike of hurting his
feelings. There was a small boil on the left side of his neck and when he
walked at her left hand, it didn't show.
"Oh, don't be fussy," she said. "It's such a dandy day."
But the half-back refused to be comforted. And he was right about that. A
woman never tells you to cheer up in that brisk unfeeling way if she really
cares a cotton hat about your troubles. And a candid deliberate self-
examination would have convinced Rose that she didn't, in spite of the
sentimentally warm March wind that was blowing her hair about. She was
less moved by the half-back's sorrows this morning than at any time during
the last six months. She'd hardly have minded the boil before to-day.
Six months ago, he had been a very wonderful person to her. There had
been a succession of pleasant—of really thrilling discoveries. First, that he'd
rather dance with her than with any other girl in the university. (You're not
to forget that he was a celebrity. During the football season, his name was
on the sporting page of the Chicago papers every day—generally in the
head-lines when there was a game to write about, and Walter Camp had
devoted a whole paragraph to explaining why he didn't put him on the first
all-American eleven but on the second instead—a gross injustice which she
had bitterly resented.)

There was a thrill, then, in the discovery that he liked her better than
other girls, and a greater thrill in the subsequent discovery that she had
become the basis of his whole orientation. It was her occupations that left
him leisure for his own; his leisure was hers to dispose of as she liked; his
energy, including his really prodigious physical prowess, to be directed
toward any object she thought laudable. Six months ago she would not have
laughed—not in that derisive way at least—at the notion of his going back
and beating up the professor.
There had been a thrill, too, in their more sentimental passages. But at
this point, there developed a most perplexing phenomenon. The idea that he
wanted to make love to her, really moved and excited her; set her
imagination to exploring all sorts of roseate mysteries. The first time he had
ever held her hand—it was inside her muff, one icy December day when he
hadn't any gloves on—the memory of the feel of that big hand, and of the
timbre of his voice, left her starry-eyed with a new wonder. She dreamed of
other caresses; of wonderful things that he should say to her and she should
say to him.
But here arose the perplexity. It was her imagination of the thing that she
enjoyed rather than the thing itself. The wonderful scenes that her own
mind projected never came true. The ones that happened were disappointing
—irritating, and eventually and unescapably, downright disagreeable to her.
There was no getting away from it, the ideal lover of her dreams, whose
tenderness and chivalry and devotion were so highly desirable, although he
might wear the half-back's clothes and bear his face and name, was not the
half-back. She might dote on his absence, but his presence was another
matter.
The realization of this fact had been gradual. She wasn't fully conscious
of it, even on this March morning. But something had happened this
morning that made a difference. If she'd been ascending an imperceptible
gradient for the last three months, to-day she had come to a recognizable
step up and taken it. Oddly enough, the thing had happened back there in
the class-room as she stood before the professor's desk and caught his eye
wavering between herself and the scrawny girl who wanted to ask a
question about Robespierre. There had been more than blank helpless

exasperation in that look of his, and it had taught her something. She
couldn't have explained what.
To the half-back she attributed it to the month of March. "You're
ridiculous, I'm ridiculous, he's ridiculous." That was about as well as she
could put it.
She and the half-back had walked about a hundred yards in silence. Now
they were arriving at a point where the path forked.
"You're elegant company this morning, I must say," he commented
resentfully.
Again she smiled. "I'm elegant company for myself," she said, and held
out her hand. "Which way do you go?" she asked.
A minute later she was swinging along alone, her shoulders back,
confronting the warm March wind, drawing into her good deep chest, long
breaths. She had just had, psychically speaking, a birthday.
She played a wonderful game of basket-ball that afternoon.

CHAPTER II

BEGINNING AN ADVENTURE

It was after five o'clock when, at the conclusion of the game and a cold
shower, a rub and a somewhat casual resumption of her clothes, she
emerged from the gymnasium. High time that she took the quickest way of
getting home, unless she wanted to be late for dinner.

But the exhilaration of the day persisted. She felt like doing something
out of the regular routine. Even a preliminary walk of a mile or so before
she should cross over and take the elevated, would serve to satisfy her mild
hunger for adventure. And, really, she liked to be a little late for dinner. It
was always pleasanter to come breezing in after things had come to a focus,
than to idle about for half an hour in that no-man's-land of the day, when the
imminence of dinner made it impossible to do anything but wait for it.
So, with her note-books under her arm and her sweater-jacket unfastened,
at a good four-mile swing, she started north. In the purlieus of the university
she was frequently hailed by friends of her own sex or the other. But though
she waved cheerful responses to their greetings, she made her stride
purposeful enough to discourage offers of company. They all seemed young
to her to-day. All her student activities seemed young. As if, somehow, she
had outgrown them. The feeling was none the less real after she had
laughed at herself for entertaining it.
She noticed presently that it was a good deal darker than it had any right
to be at this hour, and the sudden fall of the breeze and a persistent shimmer
of lightning supplied her with the explanation. When she reached Forty-
seventh Street, the break of the storm was obviously a matter of minutes, so
she decided to ride across to the elevated—it was another mile, perhaps—
rather than walk across as she had meant to do. She didn't in the least mind
getting wet, providing she could keep on moving until she could change her
clothes. But a ten-mile ride in the elevated, with water squashing around in
her boots and dripping out of her hair, wasn't an alluring prospect.
She found quite a group of people waiting on the corner for a car, and the
car itself, when it came along, was crowded. So she handed her nickel to the
conductor over somebody's shoulder, and moved back to the corner of the
vestibule. It was frightfully stuffy inside and most of the newly received
passengers seemed to agree with her that the platform was a pleasanter
place to stay; which did very well until the next stop, where half a dozen
more prospective passengers were waiting. They were in a hurry, too, since
it had begun in very downright fashion to rain.

The conductor had been chanting, "Up in the car, please," in a
perfunctory cry all along. But at this crisis, his voice got a new urgency.
"Come on, now," he proclaimed, "you'll have to get inside!"
From the step the new arrivals pushed, the conductor pushed, and finally
he was able to give the signal for starting the car. The obvious necessity of
making room for those who'd be waiting at the next corner, kept him at the
task of herding them inside and the sheep-like docility of an American
crowd helped him.
Regretfully, with the rest, Rose made her way to the door.
"Fare, please," he said sharply as she came along.
She told him she had paid her fare, but for some reason, perhaps because
he was tired at the end of a long run, perhaps because he saw some one else
he suspected of being a spotter, he elected not to believe her.
"When did you pay it?" he demanded.
"A block back," she said, "when all those other people got on."
"You didn't pay it to me," he said truculently. "Come along! Pay your fare
or get off the car."
"I paid it once," she said quietly, "and I'm not going to pay it again." With
that she started forward toward the door.
He reached out across his little rail and caught her by the arm. It was a
natural act enough—not polite, to be sure, by no means chivalrous. Still, he
probably put into his grip no more strength than he thought necessary to
prevent her walking by into the car.
But it had a surprising result—a result that normally would not have
happened. Yet, on this particular day, it could not have happened differently.
It had been a red-letter day from the beginning, from no assignable cause an
exciting joyous day, and the thrill of the hard fast game, the shower, the rub,
the walk, had brought her up to what engineers speak of as a "peak."

Well, the conductor didn't know that. If he had, he would either have let
the girl go by, or have put a good deal more force into his attempt to stop
her. And the first thing he knew, he found both his wrists pinned in the grip
of her two hands; found himself staring stupidly into a pair of great blazing
blue eyes—it's a wrathful color, blue, when you light it up—and listening
uncomprehendingly to a voice that said, "Don't dare touch me like that!"
The episode might have ended right there, for the conductor's
consternation was complete. If she could have walked straight into the car,
he would not have pursued her. But her note-books were scattered
everywhere and had to be gathered up, and there were two or three of the
passengers who thought the situation was funny, and laughed, which did not
improve the conductor's temper.
Rose was aware, as she gathered up her note-books, of another hand that
was helping her—a gloved masculine hand. She took the books it held out
to her as she straightened up, and said, "Thank you," but without looking
around for the face that went with it. The conductor's intentions were still at
the focal point of her mind. They were, apparently, unaltered. He had jerked
the bell while she was collecting her note-books and the car was grinding
down to a stop.
"You pay your fare," he repeated, "or you get off the car right here."
"Right here" was in the middle of what looked like a lake, and the rain
was pouring down with a roar.
She didn't hesitate long, but before she could answer a voice spoke—a
voice which, with intuitive certainty, she associated with the gloved hand
that had helped gather up her note-books—a very crisp, finely modulated
voice.
"That's perfectly outrageous," it said. "The young lady has paid her fare."
"Did you see her pay it?" demanded the conductor.
"Naturally not," said the voice. "I got on at the last corner. She was here
then. But if she said she did, she did."

It seemed to relieve the conductor to have some one of his own sex to
quarrel with. He delivered a stream of admonition somewhat sulphurously
phrased, to the general effect that any one whose concern the present affair
was not, could, at his option, close his jaw or have his block knocked off.
Rose hadn't, as yet, looked round at her champion. But she now became
aware that inside a shaggy gray sleeve which hung beside her, there was a
sudden tension of big muscles; the gloved hand that had helped gather up
her note-books, clenched itself into a formidable fist. The thought of the
sort of thud that fist might make against the over-active jaw of the
conductor was pleasant. Still, the thing mustn't be allowed to happen.
She spoke quickly and decisively. "I won't pay another fare, but of course
you may put me off the car."
"All right," said the conductor.
The girl smiled over the very gingerly way in which he reached out for
her elbow to guide her around the rail and toward the step. Technically, the
action constituted putting her off the car. She heard the crisp voice once
more, this time repeating a number, "twenty-two-naught-five," or something
like that, just as she splashed down into the two-inch lake that covered the
hollow in the pavement. The bell rang twice, the car started with a jerk,
there was another splash, and a big gray-clad figure alighted in the lake
beside her.
"I've got his number," the crisp voice said triumphantly.
"But," gasped the girl, "but what in the world did you get off the car for?"
It wasn't raining. It was doing an imitation of Niagara Falls, and the roar
of it almost drowned their voices.
"What did I get off the car for!" he shouted. "Why, I wouldn't have
missed it for anything. It was immense! It's so confounded seldom," he
went on, "that you find anybody with backbone enough to stick up for a
principle ..."

He heard a brief, deep-throated little laugh and pulled up short with a,
"What's the joke?"
"I laughed," she said, "because you have been deceived." And she added
quickly, "I don't believe it's quite so deep on the sidewalk, is it?" With that
she waded away toward the curb.
He followed, then led the way to a lee-wall that offered, comparatively
speaking, shelter.
Then, "Where's the deception?" he asked.
On any other day, it's probable she'd have acted differently; would have
paid some heed, though a bit contemptuously, perhaps, to the precepts of
ladylike behavior, in which she'd been admirably grounded. The case for
reticence and discretion was a strong one. The night was dark; the rain-
lashed street deserted; the man an utterly casual stranger—why, she hadn't
even had a straight look into his face. His motive in getting off the car was
at least dubitable. Even if not sinister, it could easily be unpleasantly
gallant. A man might not contemplate doing her bodily harm, and still be
capable of trying to collect some sort of sentimental reward for the ducking
he had submitted himself to.
Her instinct rejected all that. The sound of his voice, the general—
atmosphere of him had been exactly right. And then, he'd left undone the
things he ought not to have done. He hadn't tried to take hold of her arm as
they had splashed along through the lake to the curb. He hadn't exhibited
any tenderly chivalrous concern over how wet she was. And, to-day being
to-day, she consigned ladylike considerations to the inventor of them, and
gave instinct its head.
She laughed again as she answered his question. "The deception was that
I pretended to do it from principle. The real reason why I wouldn't pay
another fare, is because I had only one more nickel."
"Good lord!" said the man.
"And," she went on, "that nickel will pay my fare home on the elevated.
It's only about half a mile to the station, but from there home it's ten. So you

see I'd rather walk this than that."
"But that's dreadful," he cried. "Isn't there ... Couldn't you let me ..."
"Oh," she said, "it isn't so bad as that. It's just one of the silly things that
happen to you sometimes, you know. I didn't have very much money when I
started, it being Friday. And then I paid my subscription to The Maroon...."
She didn't laugh audibly, but without seeing her face, he knew she smiled,
the quality of her voice enriching itself somehow.... "And I ate a bigger
lunch than usual, and that brought me down to ten cents. I could have got
more of course from anybody, but ten cents, except for that conductor,
would have been enough."
"You will make a complaint about that, won't you?" he urged. "Even if it
wasn't on principle that you refused to pay another fare? And let me back
you up in it. I've his number, you know."
"You deserve that, I suppose," she said, "because you did get off the car
on principle. But—well, really, unless we could prove that I did pay my
fare, by some other passenger, you know, they'd probably think the
conductor did exactly right. Of course he took hold of me, but that was
because I was going right by him. And then, think what I did to him!"
He grumbled that this was nonsense—the man had been guilty at least of
excessive zeal—but he didn't urge her, any further, to complain.
"There's another car coming," he now announced, peering around the end
of the wall. "You will let me pay your fare on it, won't you?"
She hesitated. The rain was thinning. "I would," she said, "if I honestly
wouldn't rather walk. I'm wet through now, and it'll be pleasanter to—walk
a little of it off than to squeeze into that car. Thanks, really very, very much,
though. Don't you miss it." She thrust out her hand. "Good-by!"
"I can't pretend to think you need an escort to the elevated," he said. "I
saw what you did to the conductor. I haven't the least doubt you could have
thrown him off the car. But I'd—really like it very much if you would let
me walk along with you."

"Why," she said, "of course! I'd like it too. Come along."

CHAPTER III

FREDERICA'S PLAN AND WHAT HAPPENED TO IT

At twenty minutes after seven that evening, Frederica Whitney was about
as nearly dressed as she usually was ten minutes before the hour at which
she had invited guests to dinner—not quite near enough dressed to prevent
a feeling that she had to hurry.
Ordinarily, though, she didn't mind. She'd been an acknowledged beauty
for ten years and the fact had ceased to be exciting. She took it rather easily
for granted, and knowing what she could do if she chose, didn't distress
herself over being lighted up, on occasions, to something a good deal less
than her full candle-power. To Frederica at thirty—or thereabout—the job
of being a radiantly delightful object of regard lacked the sporting interest
of uncertainty; was almost too simple a matter to bother about.
But to-night the tenseness of her movements and the faint trace of a wire
edge in the tone in which she addressed the maid, revealed the fact that she
wished she'd started half an hour earlier. Even her husband discovered it.
He brought in a cigarette, left the door open behind him and stood smiling
down at her with the peculiarly complacent look that characterizes a
married man of forty when he finds himself dressed beyond cavil in the
complete evening harness of civilization, ten minutes before his wife.
She shot a glance of rueful inquiry at him—"Now what have you come
fussing around for?" would be perhaps a fair interpretation of it—and asked

him what time it was, in the evident hope that the boudoir clock on her
dressing-table had deceived her. It had, but in the wrong direction.
"Seven twenty-two, thirty-six," he told her. It was a perfectly harmless
passion he had for minute divisions of time, but to-night it irritated her. He
might have spared her that thirty-six seconds.
She made no comment except with her eyebrows, but he must have been
looking at her, for he wanted to know, good-humoredly, what all the
excitement was about.
"You could go down as you are and not a man here to-night would know
the difference. And as for the women—well, if they have something on you
for once, they'll be all the better pleased."
"Don't try to be knowing and philosophical, and—Havelock Ellish,
Martin, dear," she admonished him, pending a minute operation with an
infinitesimal hairpin. "It isn't your lay a bit. Just concentrate your mind on
one thing, and that's being nice to Hermione Woodruff...."
She broke off for a long stare into her hand-glass; then finished, casually,
"... and on seeing that Roddy is."
He asked, "Why Rodney?" in a tone that matched hers; looked at her,
widened his eyes, said "Huh!" to himself and, finally, shook his head.
"Nothing to it," he pronounced.
She said, "Nothing to what?" but abandoned this position as untenable.
She despatched the maid with the key to the wall safe in her husband's
room. "Why isn't there?" she demanded. "Rodney won't look at young girls.
They bore him to death—and no wonder, because he freezes them perfectly
brittle with fright. But Hermione's really pretty intelligent. She can
understand fully half the things he talks about and she's clever enough to
pretend about the rest. She's got lots of tact and skill, she's good-looking
and young enough—no older than I and I'm two years younger than Roddy.
She'll appreciate a real husband, after having been married five years to
John Woodruff. And she's rich enough, now, so that his wild-eyed way of
practising law won't matter."

"All very nice and reasonable," he conceded, "but somehow the notion of
Rodney Aldrich trying to marry a rich widow is one I'm not equal to
without a handicap of at least two cocktails." He looked at his watch again.
"By the way, didn't you say he was coming early?"
She nodded. "That's what he told me this morning when I telephoned him
to remind him that it was to-night. He said he had something he wanted to
talk to me about. I knew I shouldn't have a minute, but I didn't say so
because I thought if he tried to get here early, he might miss being late."
They heard, just then, faint and far-away, the ring of the door-bell, at
which she cried, "Oh, dear! There's some one already."
"Wait a second," he said. "Let's see if it's him."
The paneled walls and ceiling of their hall were very efficient sounding-
boards and there was no mistaking the voice they heard speaking the
moment the door opened—a voice with a crisp ring to it that sounded
always younger than his years. What he said didn't matter, just a cheerful
greeting to the butler. But what they heard the butler say to him was
disconcerting.
"You're terribly wet, sir."
Frederica turned on her husband a look of despair.
"He didn't come in a taxi! He's walked or something, through that rain!
Do run down and see what he's like. And if he's very bad, send him up to
me. I can imagine how he'll look."
She was mistaken about that though. For once Frederica had
overestimated her powers, stimulated though they were by the way she
heard her husband say, "Good lord!" when the sight of his brother-in-law
burst on him.
"Praise heaven you can wear my clothes," she heard him add. "Run along
up-stairs and break yourself gently to Freddy."

She heard him come squudging up the stairs and along the hall, and then
in her doorway she saw him. His baggy gray tweed suit was dark with the
water that saturated it. The lower part of his trousers-legs, in irregular
vertical creases, clung dismally to his ankles and toned down almost
indistinguishably into his once tan boots by the medium of a liberal stipple
of mud spatters. Evidently, he had worn no overcoat. Both his side pockets
had been, apparently, strained to the utmost to accommodate what looked
like a bunch of pasteboard-bound note-books, now far on the way to their
original pulp, and lopped despondently outward. A melancholy pool had
already begun forming about his feet.
The maddening, but yet—though she hadn't much room for any other
emotion—touching thing about the look of him, was the way his face,
above the dismal wreck, beamed good-humored innocent affection at her. It
was a big featured, strong, rosy face, and the unmistakable intellectual
power of it, which became apparent the moment he got his faculties into
action, had a trick of hiding, at other times, behind a mere robust simplicity.
"Good gracious!" he said. "I didn't know you were going to have a party."
It seemed though, he didn't want to make an issue of that. He hedged. "I
know you said something about a birthday cake, but I thought it would just
be the family. So instead of dressing, I thought I'd walk down from home. It
takes about the same time. And then it came on to rain, so I took a street-car
—and got put off."
It appeared from the way she echoed his last two words that she wanted
an explanation. He was painting with a large brush and a few details got
obliterated.
"Got into a row with the conductor, who wanted to collect two fares for
one ride, so I walked over to the elevated—and back, and here I am."
"Yes, here you are," said Frederica.
She didn't mean anything by that. Already she was making up her mind
what she would do with him. His own suggestion was that he should
decamp furtively by the back stairs, the sound of new arrivals to the dinner

party warning him that the other way of escape was barred. Waiters could
be instructed to rescue his hat for him, and he could toddle along down-
town again.
She didn't give him time to complete the outline of this masterly
stratagem. "Don't be impossible, Rod," she said. "Don't you even know
whose birthday party this is?"
He looked at her, frowned, then laughed. He had a great big laugh.
"I thought it was one of the kid's," he said.
"Well, it isn't," she told him. "It's yours. And those people down there
were asked to meet you. And you've got just about seven minutes to get
presentable in. Go into Martin's bathroom and take off those horrible
clothes. I'll send Walters in to lay out some things of Martin's."
She came up to him and, at arm's length, touched him with cautious
finger-tips. "And do, please, there's a dear boy," she pleaded, "hurry as fast
as you can, and then come down and be as nice as you can"—she hesitated
—"especially to Hermione Woodruff. She thinks you're a wonder and I
don't want her to be disappointed."
"The widdy?" he asked. "Sure I'll be nice to her."
She looked after him rather dubiously as he disappeared in the direction
of her husband's room.
She'd have felt safer about him if he had seemed more subdued as a result
of his escapade. There was a sort of hilarious contentment about him that
filled her with misgivings.
Well, they were justified!
But the maddening thing was, she had afterward to admit, that the
disaster had been largely of her own contriving. She had been caught in the
net of her own stratagem—hoist by her own petard.
She had made it a six-couple dinner in order to insure that the talk should
be by twos rather than general, and she had spent a good half-hour over the

place-cards, getting them to suit her.
Hermione had to be on Martin's right hand, of course. She was just back
in the city after an absence of years, and everybody was rushing her. She
put Violet Williamson, whom Martin was always flirting with in a harmless
way, on his left, and Rod to the right of Hermione. At Rodney's right, she
put a girl he had known for years and cared nothing whatever about, and
then Howard West—who probably wasn't interested in her either, but would
be polite because he was to everybody. Frederica herself sat between Carl
Leaventritt of the university—a great acquisition, since whatever you might
think of him as an empirical psychologist, there was no doubt of his being
an accomplished diner-out—and Violet's husband, as he vociferously
proclaimed himself, John Williamson, an untired business man who, had
their seasons coincided, could have enjoyed a ball game in the afternoon
and stayed awake at the opera in the evening. Doctor Randolph's pretty wife
she slid in between Leaventritt and Howard West, and, in happy ignorance
of what the result was going to be, she put Randolph himself between Violet
and Alice West. He was a young, up-to-the-minute mind and nerve doctor.
It was an admirable plan all right, the key-note of it being, as you no
doubt will have observed, the easy unforced isolation of Rodney and the
rich widow. Before that dinner was over, they ought to be old friends.
And, for a little while, all went well. Rodney came down almost within
the seven minutes she had allowed him, looking much less dreadful than
she had expected, in her husband's other dress suit, and not forgetful, it
appeared, of the line of behavior she had enjoined on him; namely, that he
was to be nice to Hermione Woodruff.
From her end of the table, she saw them apparently safely launched in
conversation over the hors-d'oeuvre, took a look at them during the soup to
see that all was still well, then let herself be beguiled into a conversation
with John Williamson, whom she liked as well as Martin did Violet. She
never thought of the objects of her matrimonial design again until her ear
was caught by a huge seven-cornered word in her brother's voice. He
couldn't be saying it to Hermione; no, he was leaning forward, shouting at

Doctor Randolph, who apparently knew what he meant and was getting
visibly ready to reply in kind.
According to Violet Williamson's account, given confidentially in the
drawing-room afterward, it was really Hermione's fault. "She just wouldn't
let Rodney alone—would keep talking about crime and Lombroso and
psychiatric laboratories—I'll bet she'd got hold of a paper of his somewhere
and read it. Anyway, at last she said, 'I believe Doctor Randolph would
agree with me.' He was talking to me then, but maybe that isn't why she did
it. Well, and Rodney straightened up and said, 'Is that Randolph, the
alienist!' You see he hadn't caught his name when they were introduced.
And that's how it started. Hermione was game—I'll admit that. She listened
and kept looking interested, and every now and then said something.
Sometimes they'd take the trouble to smile and say 'Yes, indeed!'—politely,
you know, but other times they wouldn't pay any attention at all, just roll
along over her and smash her flat—like what's his name—Juggernaut."
"You don't need to tell me that," said Frederica. "All I didn't know was
how it started. Didn't I sit there and watch for a mortal hour, not able to do a
thing? I tried to signal to Martin, but of course he wasn't opposite to me and
..."
"He did all he could, really," Violet answered her. "I told him to go to the
rescue, and he did, bravely. But what with Hermione being so miffy about
getting frozen out, and Martin himself being so interested in what they were
shouting at each other—because it was frightfully interesting, you know, if
you didn't have to pretend you understood it—why, there wasn't much he
could do."
In the light of this disaster, she was rather glad the men lingered in the
dining-room as long as they did—glad that Hermione had ordered her car
for ten and took the odd girl with her. She made no effort to resist the
departure of the others, with reasonable promptitude, in their train. When,
after the front door had closed for the last time, Martin released a long
yawn, she told him to run along to bed; she wanted to talk with Rodney,
who was to spend the night while his own clothes were drying out in the
laundry.

"Good night, old chap," said Martin in accents of lively commiseration,
"I'm glad I'm not in for what you are."

CHAPTER IV

ROSALIND STANTON DOESN'T DISAPPEAR

Rodney found a pipe of his that he kept concealed on the premises,
loaded and lighted it, sat down astride a spindling little chair that looked
hardly up to his weight, settled his elbows comfortably on the back of it,
and then asked his sister what Martin had meant—what was he in for?
Frederica, curled up in a corner of the sofa, finished her own train of
thought aloud, first.
"She's awfully attractive, don't you think? His wife, I mean. Oh, James
Randolph's, of course." She turned to Rodney, looked at him at first with a
wry pucker between her eyebrows, then with a smile, and finally answered
his question. "Nothing," she said. "I mean, I was going to scold you, but I'm
not."
"Why, yes," he admitted through his smoke. "Randolph's wife's a mighty
pretty woman. But I expect that lets her out, doesn't it?"
Frederica shook her head. "She's a good deal of a person, I should say, on
the strength of to-night's showing. She kept her face perfectly through the
whole thing—didn't try to nag at him or apologize to the rest of us. I'd like
to know what she's saying to him now."

Then, "Oh, I was furious with you an hour ago," she went on. "I'd made
such a nice, reasonable, really beautiful plan for you, and given you a tip
about it, and then I sat and watched you in that thoroughgoing way of
yours, kicking it all to bits. But somehow, when I see you all by yourself,
this way, it changes things. I get to thinking that perhaps my plan was silly
after all—anyhow, it was silly to make it. The plan was, of course, to marry
you off to Hermione Woodruff."
He turned this over in his deliberate way, during the process of blowing
two or three smoke rings, began gradually to grin, and said at last, "That
was some plan, little sister. How do you think of things like that? You ought
to write romances for the magazines, that's what you ought to do."
"I don't know," she objected. "If reasonableness counted for anything in
things like that, it was a pretty good plan. It would have to be somebody
like Hermione. You can't get on at all with young girls. As long as you
remember they're around, you're afraid to say anything except milk and
water out of a bottle that makes them furious, and then if you forget whom
you're talking to and begin thinking out loud, developing some idea or
other, you—simply paralyze them.
"Well, Hermione's sophisticated and clever, she's lived all over the place;
she isn't old yet, and she was a brick about that awful husband of hers—
never made any fuss—bluffed it out until he, luckily, died. Of course she'll
marry again, and I just thought, if you liked the idea, it might as well be
you."
"I don't know," said Rodney, "whether Mrs. Woodruff knows what she
wants or not, but I do. She wants a run for her money—a big house to live
in three months in the year, with a flock of servants and a fleet of motor-
cars, and a string of what she'll call cottages to float around among, the rest
of the time. And she'll want a nice, tame, trick husband to manage things for
her and be considerate and affectionate and amusing, and, generally
speaking, Johnny-on-the-spot whenever she wants him. If she has sense
enough to know what she wants in advance, it will be all right. She can take
her pick of dozens. But if she gets a sentimental notion in her head—and
I've a hunch that she's subject to them—that she wants a real man, with

something of his own to do, there'll be, saving your presence, hell to pay.
And if the man happened to be me ...!"
Frederica stretched her slim arms outward. Thoughtful-faced, she made
no comment on his analysis of the situation, unless a much more observant
person than Rodney might have imagined there was one in the deliberate
way in which she turned her rings, one at a time, so that the brilliant masses
of gems were inside, and then clenched her hands over them.
He had got up and was ranging comfortably up and down the room.
"I know I look more or less like a nut to the people who've always known
us—father's and mother's friends, and most of their children. But I give you
my word, Freddy, that most of them look like nuts to me. Why, they live in
curiosity shops—so many things around, things they have and things
they've got to do, that they can't act or think for fear of breaking something.
"Why a man should load himself up with three houses and a yacht, a
stable of motor-cars, and God knows what besides, when he's rich enough
to buy himself real space and leisure to live in, is a thing I can't figure out
on any basis except of defective intelligence. I suppose they're equally
puzzled about me when I refuse a profitable piece of law work they've
offered me, because I don't consider it interesting. All the same, I get what I
want, and I'm pretty dubious sometimes whether they do. I want space—
comfortable elbow room, so that if I happen to get an idea by the tail, I can
swing it around my head without knocking over the lamp."
"It's a luxury though, Rod, that kind of spaciousness, and you aren't very
rich. If you married a girl without anything ..."
He broke in on her with that big laugh of his. "You've kept your sense of
humor pretty well, sis, considering you've been married all these years to a
man as rich as Martin, but don't spring remarks like that, or I'll think you've
lost it. If a man can't keep an open space around him, even after he's
married, on an income, outside of what he can earn, of ten or twelve
thousand dollars a year, the trouble isn't with his income. It's with the
content of his own skull."

She gave a little shiver and snuggled closer into a big down pillow.
"You will marry somebody, though, won't you, Roddy? I'll try not to nag
at you and I won't make any more silly plans, but I can't help worrying
about you, living alone in that awful big old house. Anybody but you would
die of despondency."
"Oh," he said, "that's what I meant to talk to you about! I sold it to-day—
fifty thousand dollars—immediate possession. Man wants to build a
printing establishment there. You come down sometime next week and pick
out all the things you think you and Harriet would like to keep, and I'll
auction off the rest."
She shivered again and, to her disgust, found that her eyes were blurring
up with tears. She was a little bit slack and edgy to-day, anyhow.
But really there was something rather remorseless about Rodney. It
occurred to her that the woman he finally did marry would need to be
strong and courageous and rather insensitive to sentimental fancies, to avoid
a certain amount of unhappiness.
What he had just referred to in a dozen brisk words, was the final
disappearance of the home they had all grown up in. Their father, one of
Chicago's great men during the twenty great years between the Fire and the
Fair, had built it when the neighborhood included nearly all the other big
men of that robust period, and had always been proud of it. There was
hardly a stone or stick about it that hadn't some tender happy association for
her. Of course for years the neighborhood had been impossible. Her mother
had clung to it after her husband's death, as was of course natural.
But when she had followed him, a year ago now, it was evident that the
old place would have to go. Rodney, who had lived alone with her there,
had simply stayed on, since her death, waiting for an offer for it that suited
him. Frederica had known that, of course—had worried about him, as she
said, and in her imagination, had colored his loneliness to the same dismal
hue her own would have taken on in similar circumstances.

All the same, his curt announcement that the long-looked-for change had
come, brought up quick unwelcomed tears. She squeezed them away with
her palms.
"You'll come to us then, won't you?" she asked, but quite without
conviction. She knew what he'd say.
"Heavens, no! Oh, I'll go to a hotel for a while—maybe look up a little
down-town apartment, with a Jap. It doesn't matter much about that. It's a
load off, all right."
"Is that," she asked, "why you've been looking so sort of—gay, all the
evening—as if you were licking the last of the canary's feathers off your
whiskers?"
"Perhaps so," he said. "It's been a pretty good day, take it all round."
She got up from the couch, shook herself down into her clothes a little,
and came over to him.
"All right, since it's been a good day, let's go to bed." She put her hands
upon his shoulders. "You're rather dreadful," she said, "but you're a dear.
You don't bite my head off when I urge you to get married, though I know
you want to. But you will some day—I don't mean bite my head off—won't
you, Rod?"
"When I see any prospect of being as lucky as Martin—find a girl who
won't mind when I turn up for dinner looking like a drowned tramp, or kick
her plans to bits, after she's tipped me off as to what she wants me to do ..."
Frederica took her hands off, stepped back and looked at him. There was
an ironical sort of smile on her lips.
"You're such an innocent," she said. "You've got an idea you know me—
know how I treat Martin. Roddy, dear, a girl's brother doesn't matter. She
isn't dependent on him, nor responsible for him. And if she's rather sillily
fond of him, she's likely to spoil him frightfully. Don't think the girl you
marry will ever treat you like that."

"But look here!" he exclaimed. "You say I don't know you, whom I've
lived with off and on for thirty years—don't know how you'd treat me if you
were married to me. How in thunder am I going to know about the girl I get
engaged to, before it's too late?"
"You won't," she said. "You haven't a chance in the world."
"Hm!" he grunted, obviously struck with this idea. "You're giving the
prospect of marriage new attractions. You're making the thing out—an
adventure."
She nodded rather soberly. "Oh, I'm not afraid for you," she said. "Men
like adventures—you more than most. But women don't. They like to dream
about them, but they want to turn over to the last chapter and see how it's
going to end. It's the girl I'm worried about.... Oh, come along! We're
talking nonsense. I'll go up with you and see that they've given you pajamas
and a tooth-brush."
She had accomplished this purpose, kissed him good night, and under the
hint of his unbuttoned waistcoat and his winding watch, turned to leave the
room, when her eye fell on a heap of damp, warped, pasteboard-bound
note-books, which she remembered having observed in his side pockets
when he first came in. The color on the pasteboard binding had run, and as
they lay on the drawn linen cover to the chiffonier, she went over and
picked them up to see how much damage they'd done. Then she frowned,
peered at the paper label that had half peeled off of the topmost cover, and
read what was written on it.
"Who," she asked with considerable emphasis, "is Rosalind Stanton?"
"Oh," said Rodney very casually, behind the worst imitation of a yawn
she had ever seen, "oh, she got put off the car when I did."
"That sounds rather exciting," said Frederica behind an imitation yawn of
her own—but a better one. "Going to tell me about it?"
"Nothing much to tell," said Rodney. "There was a row about a fare, as I
said. The conductor was evidently solid concrete above the collar-bone, and
didn't think she'd paid. And she grabbed him and very nearly threw him out

into the street—could have done it, I believe, as easily as not. And he began
to talk about punching somebody's head. And then, we both got put off. So,
naturally, I walked with her over to the elevated. And then I forgot to give
her her note-books and came away with them."
"What sort of looking girl?" asked Frederica. "Is she pretty?"
"Why, I don't know," said Rodney judicially. "Really, you know, I hardly
got a fair look at her."
Frederica made a funny sounding laugh and wished him an abrupt "good
night."
She was a great old girl, Frederica—pretty wise about lots of things, but
Rodney was inclined to think she was mistaken in saying women didn't like
adventures. Take that girl this afternoon, for example. Evidently she was
willing to meet one half-way. And how she'd blazed up when that conductor
touched her! Just the memory of it brought back something of the thrill he
had felt when he saw it happen.
"You're a liar, you know," remarked his conscience, "telling Frederica you
hadn't had a good look at her."
On the contrary, he argued, it was perfectly justifiable to deny that a look
as brief as that, was good. He wouldn't deny, however, that the thing had
been a wholly delightful and exhilarating little episode. That was the way to
have things happen! Have them pop out of nowhere at you and disappear
presently, into the same place.
"Disappear indeed!" sneered his conscience. "How about those note-
books, with her name and address on every one. And there's another lie you
told—about forgetting to give them to her!"
He protested that it was entirely true. He had gone into the station with
the girl, shaken hands with her, said good night, and turned away to leave
the station, unaware—as evidently she was—that he still had her note-
books under his arm. But it was equally true that he had discovered them
there, a good full second before the girl had turned the corner of the stairs—

in plenty of time to have called her back to the barrier, and handed them
over to her.
"All right, have it your own way," said Rodney cheerfully, as he turned
out the light.

CHAPTER V

THE SECOND ENCOUNTER

Portia Stanton was late for lunch; so, after stripping off her jacket and
gloves, rolling up her veil and scowling at herself in an oblong mahogany-
framed mirror in the hall, she walked into the dining-room with her hat on.
Seeing her mother sitting alone at the lunch table, she asked, "Where is
Rose?"
"She'll be down presently, I think," her mother said. "She called out to me
that she'd only be a minute, when I passed her door. Does your hat mean
you're going back to the shop this afternoon?"
Portia nodded, pulled back her chair abruptly and sat down. "Oh, don't
ring for Inga," she said. "What's here's all right, and she takes forever."
"I thought that on Saturday ..." her mother began.
"Oh, I know," said Portia, "but Anne Loomis telephoned she's going to
bring Dora Wild around to pick out which of my three kidney sofas she
wants for a wedding present. That girl I've got isn't much good, and besides,
I think there's a chance that Dora may give me her house to do. Her man's

stupidly rich, they say, and richly stupid, so the job ought to be worth eating
a cold egg for."
You'd have known them for mother and daughter anywhere, and you'd
have had trouble finding any point of resemblance in either of them to the
Amazonian young thing who had so nearly thrown a street-car conductor
into the street the night before. Their foreheads were both narrow and rather
high, their noses small and slightly aquiline, and both of them had slender
fastidious hands.
The mother's hair was very soft and white, and the care with which it was
arranged indicated a certain harmless vanity in it. There was something a
little conscious, too, about her dress—an effect difficult to describe without
exaggeration. It was not bizarre nor "artistic," but you would have
understood at once that its departures from the prevailing mode were made
on principle. If you took it in connection with a certain resolute amiability
about her smile, you would be entirely prepared to hear her tell Portia that
she was reading a paper on Modern Tendencies before the Pierian Club this
afternoon.
A very real person, nevertheless, you couldn't doubt that. The marks of
passionately held beliefs and eagerly given sacrifices were etched with
undeniable authenticity in her face.
Once you got beyond a catalogue of features, Portia presented rather a
striking contrast to this. Her hair was done—you could hardly say arranged
—with a severity that was fairly hostile. Her clothes were bruskly cut and
bruskly worn, their very smartness seeming an impatient concession to
necessity. Her smile, if not ill-natured—it wasn't that—was distinctly ironic.
A very competent, good-looking young woman, you'd have said, if you'd
seen her with her shoulder-blades flattened down and her chest up. Seeing
her to-day, drooping a little over the cold lunch, you'd have left out the
adjective young.
"So Rose didn't come down this morning at all," Portia observed, when
she had done her duty by the egg. "You took her breakfast up to her, I
suppose."

Mrs. Stanton flushed a little. "She didn't want me to; but I thought she'd
better keep quiet."
"Nothing particular the matter with her, is there?" asked Portia.
There was enough real concern in her voice to save the question from
sounding satirical, but her mother's manner was still a little apologetic when
she answered it.
"No, I think not," she said. "I think the mustard foot-bath and the quinine
probably averted serious consequences. But she was in such a state when
she came home last night—literally wet through to the skin, and blue with
cold. So I thought it wouldn't do any harm ..."
"Of course not," said Portia. "You're entitled to one baby anyway, mother,
dear. Life was such a strenuous thing for you when the rest of us were little,
that you hadn't a chance to have any fun with us. And Rose is all right. She
won't spoil badly."
"I'm a little bit worried about the loss of the poor child's note-books," said
her mother. "I rather hoped they'd come in by the noon mail. But they
didn't."
"I don't believe Rose is worrying her head off about them." said Portia.
The flush in her mother's cheeks deepened a little, but it was no longer
apologetic.
"I don't think you're quite fair to Rose, about her studies," she said. "The
child may not be making a brilliant record, but really, considering the
number of her occupations, it seems to me she does very well. And if she
doesn't seem always to appreciate her privilege in getting a college
education, as seriously as she should, you should remember her youth."
"She's twenty," said Portia bluntly. "You graduated at that age, and you
took it seriously enough."
"It's very different," her mother insisted. "And I'm sure you understand
the difference quite well. Higher education was still an experiment for

women then—one of the things they were fighting for. And those of us by
whom the success of the experiment was to be judged ..."
"I'm sorry, mother," Portia interrupted contritely. "I'm tired and ugly to-
day, and I didn't mean any harm, anyway. Of course Rose is all right, just as
I said. And she'll probably get her note-books back Monday." Then, "Didn't
she say the man's name was Rodney Aldrich?"
"I think so," her mother agreed. "Something like that."
"It's rather funny," said Portia. "It's hardly likely to have been the real
Rodney Aldrich. Yet, it's not a common name."
"The real Rodney Aldrich?" questioned her mother. But, without waiting
for her daughter's elucidation of the phrase, she added, "Oh, there's Rose!"
The girl came shuffling into the room in a pair of old bedroom slippers.
She had on a skirt that she used to go skating in, and a somewhat tumbled
middy-blouse. Her hair was wopsed around her head anyhow—it really
takes one of Rose's own words to describe it. As a toilet representing the
total accomplishment of a morning, it was nothing to boast of. But, if you'd
been sitting there, invisibly, where you could see her, you'd have
straightened up and drawn a deeper breath than you'd indulged in lately, and
felt that the world was distinctly a brighter place to live in than it had been a
moment before.
She came up behind Portia, whom she had not seen before that day, and
enveloped her in a big lazy hug.
"Back to work another Saturday afternoon, Angel?" she asked
commiseratingly. "Aren't you ever going to stop and have any fun?" Then
she slumped into a chair, heaved a yawning sigh and rubbed her eyes.
"Tired, dear?" asked her mother. She said it under her breath in the hope
that Portia wouldn't hear.
"No," said Rose. "Just sleepy." She yawned again, turned to Portia, and,
somewhat to their surprise, said: "Yes, what do you mean—the real Rodney

Aldrich? He looked real enough to me. And his arm felt real—the one he
was going to punch the conductor with."
"I didn't mean he was imaginary," Portia explained. "I only meant I didn't
believe it was the Rodney Aldrich—who's so awfully prominent; either
somebody else who happened to have the same name, or somebody who
just—said that was his name."
"What's the matter with the prominent one?" Rose wanted to know. "Why
couldn't it have been him?"
Portia admitted that it could, so far as that went, but insisted on an
inherent improbability. A millionaire, a member of one of the oldest
families in the city—a social swell, the brother of that Mrs. Martin Whitney
whose pictures the papers were always publishing on the slightest excuse—
wasn't likely to be found riding in street-cars, in the first place, and the
improbability reached a climax during a furious storm like that of last night,
when, if ever during the year, the real Rodney Aldrich would be saying,
"Home, James," to a liveried chauffeur, and sinking back luxuriously
among the whip-cord cushions of a palatial limousine.
I hasten to say that these were not Portia's words; all the same, what
Portia did say, formed a basis for Rose's unspoken caricature.
"Millionaires have legs," she said aloud. "I bet they can walk around like
anybody else. However, I don't care who he is, if he'll send back my books."
Portia went back presently to the shop, and it wasn't long after that that
her mother came down-stairs clad for the street, with her Modern
Tendencies under her arm in a leather portfolio.
It had turned cold overnight, and there was a buffeting gusty wind which
shook the windows and rattled the stiff branches of the trees. Her mother's
valedictory, given with more confidence now that Portia was out of the
house, was a strong recommendation that Rose stay quietly within doors
and keep warm.
The girl might have palmed off her own inclination as an example of
filial obedience, but she didn't.

"I was going to, anyway," she said. "Home and fireside for mine to-day."
Ordinarily, the gale would have tempted her. It was such good fun to lean
up against it and force your way through, while it tugged at your skirts and
hair and slapped your face.
But to-day, the warmest corner of the sitting-room lounge, the quiet of the
house, deserted except for Inga in the kitchen, engaged in the principal
sporting event of her domestic routine—the weekly baking; the fact that she
needn't speak to a soul for three hours, a detective story just wild enough to
make little intervals in the occupation of doing nothing at all—presented an
ideal a hundred per cent. perfect.
She hadn't meant to go to sleep, having already slept away half the
morning, but the author's tactics in the detective story were so flagrantly
unfair, he was so manifestly engaged trying to make trouble for his poor
anemic characters instead of trying to solve their perplexities, that presently
she tossed the book aside and began dreaming one of her own in which the
heroine got put off a street-car in the opening chapter.
The telephone bell roused her once or twice, far enough to observe that
Inga was attending to it, so when the front door-bell rang, she left that to
Inga, too—didn't even sit up and swing her legs off the couch and try, with
a prodigious stretch, to get herself awake, until she heard the girl say
casually:
"Her ban right in the sitting-room."
So it fell out that Rodney Aldrich had, for his second vivid picture of her,
—the first had been, you will remember, when she had seized the conductor
by both wrists, and had said in a blaze of beautiful wrath, "Don't dare to
touch me like that!"—a splendid, lazy, tousled creature, in a chaotic glory of
chestnut hair, an unlaced middy-blouse, a plaid skirt twisted round her
knees, and a pair of ridiculous red bedroom slippers, with red pompons on
the toes. The creature was stretching herself with the grace of a big cat that
has just been roused from a nap on the hearth-rug.

If his first picture of her had been brief, his second one was practically a
snap-shot, because at sight of him, she flashed to her feet.
So, for a moment, they confronted each other about equally aghast,
flushed up to the hair, and simultaneously and incoherently, begging each
other's pardon—neither could have said for what, the goddess out of the
machine being Inga, the maid-of-all-work. But suddenly, at a twinkle she
caught in his eye, her own big eyes narrowed and her big mouth widened
into a smile, which broke presently into her deep-throated laugh,
whereupon he laughed too, and they shook hands, and she asked him to sit
down.

At sight of him she flashed to her feet.

CHAPTER VI

THE BIG HORSE

"It's too ridiculous," she said. "Since last night, when I got to thinking
how I must have looked, wrestling with that conductor, I've been telling
myself that if I ever saw you again, I'd try to act like a lady. But it's no use,
is it?"
He said that he, too, had hoped to make a better impression the second
time than the first. That was what he brought the books back for. He had
hoped to convince her that a man capable of consigning a half-drowned girl
to a ten-mile ride on the elevated, instead of walking her over to his sister's,
having her dried out properly, and sent home in a motor, wasn't permanently
and chronically as blithering an idiot as he may have seemed. It was a great
load off of his mind to find her alive at all.
She gave him a humorously exaggerated account of the prophylactic
measures her mother had submitted her to the night before, and she
concluded:
"I'm awfully sorry mother's not at home—mother and my sister Portia.
They'd both like to thank you for—looking after me last night. Because
really, you did, you know."
"There never was anything less altruistic in the world," he assured her. "I
dropped off of that car solely in pursuit of a selfish aim. And I didn't come
out here to-day to be thanked, either. I mean, of course, I'd enjoy meeting
your mother and sister very much, but what I came for was to get
acquainted with you."
He saw her glance wander a little dubiously to the door. "That is," he
concluded, "if you haven't something else to do."

She flushed and smiled. "No, it wasn't that," she said, "I was trying to
make up my mind whether it would be better to ask you to wait here ten
minutes while I went up and made myself a little more presentable.... I
mean, whether you'd rather have me fit to look at, or have me like this and
not be bored by waiting. It's all one to me, you see, because even if I did
come down again presentable, you'd know—well, that I wasn't that way
naturally."
Whereupon he laughed out again, told her that a ten-minute wait would
bore him horribly, and that if she didn't mind, he much preferred her
natural.
"All right," she said, and went on with the conversation where she had
interrupted it.
"Why, I'm nobody much to get acquainted with," she said. "Mother's the
interesting one—mother and Portia. Mother's quite a person. She's Naomi
Rutledge Stanton, you know."
"I know I ought to know," Rodney said, and her quick appreciative smile
over his candor rewarded him for not having pretended.
"Oh," she said, "mother's written two or three books, and lots of
magazine articles, about women—women's rights and suffrage, and all that.
She's been—well, sort of a leader ever since she graduated from college,
back in—just think!—1870, when most girls used to have—
accomplishments—'French, music, and washing extra,' you know."
She said it all with a quite adorable seriousness and his gravity matched
hers when he replied:
"I would like to meet her very much. Feminism's a subject I'm blankly
ignorant about."
"I don't believe," she said thoughtfully, "that I'd call it feminism in talking
to mother about it, if I were you. Mother's a suffragist, but"—there came
another wave of faint color along with her smile—"but—well, she's awfully
respectable, you know."

She didn't seem to mind his laughing out at that, though she didn't join
him.
"What about the other interesting member of the family," he asked
presently, "your sister? Which is she, a suffragist or a feminist?"
"I suppose," she said, "you'll call Portia a feminist. Anyway, she smokes
cigarettes. Oh, can't I get you some? I forgot!"
He had a case of his own in his pocket, he said, and got one out now and
lighted it.
"Why," she went on, "Portia hasn't time to talk about it much. You see,
she's a business woman. She's a house decorator. I don't mean painting and
paper-hanging. She tells you what kind of furniture to buy, and then sells it
to you. Portia's terribly clever and awfully independent."
"All right," he said. "That brings us down to you. What are you?"
She sighed. "I'm sort of a black sheep, I guess. I'm just in the university.
But I'm to be a lawyer."
Whereupon he cried out "Good lord!" so explosively that she fairly
jumped.
Then he apologized, said he didn't know why her announcement should
have taken him like that, except that the notion of her in court trying a case
—he was a lawyer himself—seemed rather startling.
She sighed. "And now I suppose," she said, "you'll advise me not to be.
Portia won't hear of my being a decorator. She says there's nothing in it any
more; and my two brothers—one's a professor of history and the other's a
high-school principal—say, 'Let her do anything but teach.' One of mother's
great friends is a doctor, and she says, 'Anything but medicine,' so I suppose
you'll say, 'Anything but law.'"
"Not a bit," he said. "It's the finest profession in the world."
But he said it off the top of his mind. Down below, it was still engaged
with the picture of her in a dismal court room, blazing up at a jury the way

she had blazed up at that street-car conductor. It was a queer notion. He
didn't know whether he liked it or not.
"I suppose," she hazarded, "that it's awfully dull and tiresome, though,
until you get way up to the top."
That roused him. "It's awfully dull when you do get to the top, or what's
called the top—being a client caretaker with the routine law business of a
few big corporations and rich estates going through your office like grist
through a mill. I can't imagine anything duller than that. That's supposed to
be the big reward, of course. That's the bundle of hay they dangle in front of
your nose to keep you trotting straight along without trying to see around
your blinders."
He was out of his chair now, tramping up and down the room. "You're not
supposed to discover that it's interesting. You're pretty well spoiled for their
purposes if you do. The thing to bear in mind, if you're going to travel their
road, is that a case is worth while in a precise and unalterable ratio to the
amount of money involved in it. If you question that axiom at all seriously,
you're lost. That's what happened to me."
He pulled up with a jerk, looked at her and laughed. "If my sister
Frederica were here," he explained, "she would warn you, out of a long
knowledge of my conversational habits, that now was the time for you to
ask me,—firmly, you know,—if I'd been to see Maude Adams in this new
thing of hers, or something like that. In Frederica's absence, I suppose it's
only fair to warn you myself. Have you been to see it? I haven't."
She smiled in a sort of contented amusement and let that do for an answer
to his question about Maude Adams. Then the smile transmuted itself into a
look of thoughtful gravity and there was a long silence which, though it
puzzled him, he made no move to break.
At last she pulled in a long breath, turned straight to him and said, "I wish
you'd tell me what did happen to you."
And under the compelling sincerity of her, for the next two hours and a
half, or thereabouts, he did—told it as he had never told it before—talked as

Frederica, who thought she knew him, had never heard him talk.
He told her how he had started at the foot of the ladder in one of the big
successful firms of what he called "client caretakers," drawing up bills and
writs, rounding up witnesses in personal injury suits, trying little justice-
shop cases—the worst of them, of course, because there was a youngster
just ahead of him who got the better ones. And then, dramatically, he told of
his discovery amid this chaff, of a real legal problem—a problem that for its
nice intricacies and intellectual suggestiveness, would have brought an
appreciative gleam to the eye of Mr. Justice Holmes, or Lord Mansfield, or
the great Coke himself. He told of the passionate enthusiasm with which he
had attacked it, the thrilling weeks of labor he had put on it. And then he
told her the outcome of it all; how the head of the firm, an old friend of his
father, had called him in and complimented him on the work that he had
done; said it was very remarkable, but, unfortunately, not profitable to the
firm, the whole amount involved in the case having been some twenty
dollars. They were only paying him forty dollars a month, to be sure, but
they figured that forty dollars practically a total loss and they thought he
might better go to practising law for himself. In other words, he was fired.
But the thing that rang through the girl's mind like the clang of a bell—
the thing that made her catch her breath, was the quality of the big laugh
with which he concluded it. He didn't ask her to be sorry for him. He wasn't
sorry for himself one bit,—nor bitter—nor cynical. He didn't even seem
trying to make a merit of his refusal to acquiesce in that sordid point of
view. He just dismissed the thing with a cymbal-like clash of laughter and
plunged ahead with his story.
He told her how he'd got in with an altruistic bunch—the City Homes
Association; how, finding him keen for work that they had little time for,
the senior legal counselors had drawn out and let him do it. And from the
way he told of his labors in drafting a new city building ordinance, she felt
that it must have been one of the most fascinating occupations in the world,
until he told her how it had drawn him into politics—municipal, city
council politics, which was even more thrilling, and then how, after an
election, a new state's attorney had offered him a position on his staff of
assistants.

In a sense, of course, it was true that he had, as Frederica would have put
it, forgotten she was there—had forgotten, at least, who she was. Because,
if he had remembered that she was just a young girl in the university, he
would hardly, as he tramped about the room expounding the practise of
criminal law in the state's attorney's office, have characterized the state's
attorney himself as a "damned gallery-playing mountebank," nor have
described the professions and the misdeeds of some of the persons he
prosecuted in blunt Anglo-Saxon terms she had never heard used except in
the Bible.
The girl knew he had forgotten, and her only discomfort came from the
fear that the spell might be broken and he remember suddenly and be
embarrassed and stop.
In the deeper sense—and she was breathlessly conscious of this too—he
hadn't forgotten she was there. He was telling it all because she was there—
because she was herself and nobody else. She knew, though how she
couldn't have explained,—with that intuitive certainty that is the only real
certainty there is,—that the story couldn't have been evoked from him in
just that way, by any one else in the world.
At the end of two years in the state's attorney's office, he told her, he
figured he had had his training and was ready to begin.
"I made just one resolution when I hung out my shingle," he said, "and
that was that no matter how few cases I got, I wouldn't take any that weren't
interesting—that didn't give me something to bite on. A lot of my friends
thought I was crazy, of course—the ones who came around because they
liked me, or had liked my father, to offer me nice plummy little sinecures,
and got told I didn't want them. Just for the sake of looking successful and
accumulating a lot of junk I didn't want, I wasn't going to asphyxiate
myself, have strings tied to my arms and legs like a damned marionette. I
wasn't willing to be bored for any reward they had to offer me. It's cynical
to be bored. It's the worst immorality there is. Well, and I never have been."
It wasn't all autobiographical and narrative. There was a lot of his deep-
breathing, spacious philosophy of life mixed up in it. And this the girl,

consciously, and deliberately, provoked. It didn't need much. She said
something about discipline and he snatched the word away from her.
"What is discipline? Why, it's standing the gaff—standing it, not
submitting to it. It's accepting the facts of life—of your own life, as they
happen to be. It isn't being conquered by them. It's not making masters of
them, but servants to the underlying things you want."
She tried to make a reservation there—suppose the things you wanted
weren't good things.
But he wouldn't allow it.
"Whatever they are," he insisted, "your desires are the only motive forces
you've got. No matter how fine your intelligence is, it can't ride anywhere
except on the backs of your own passions. There's no good lamenting that
they're not different, and it's silly to beat them to death and make a merit of
not having ridden anywhere because they might have carried you into
trouble. Learn to ride them—control them—spur them. But don't forget that
they're you just as essentially as the rider is."
It was with a curiously relaxed body, her chin cradled in the crook of her
arm that lay along the back of the couch, her eyes unfocused on the
window, that the girl listened to it.
Primarily, indeed, she wasn't exactly listening. Much of the narrative
went by almost unheard. Much of the philosophy she hardly tried to
understand. What was constantly present and more and more poignantly
vivid with every five minutes that ticked away on the banjo clock, was a
consciousness of the man himself, the driving power of him, the boisterous
health and freshness and confidence. She was conscious, too, of something
formidable—carelessly exultant in his own strength. She got to thinking of
the flight of a great bird wheeling up higher and higher on his powerful
wings.
He had caught her up, too, and was carrying her to altitudes far beyond
her own powers. He might drop her, but if he did, it wouldn't be through
weakness. At what he said about riding on the backs of one's own passions,

her imagination varied the picture so that she saw him galloping splendidly
by.
At that, suddenly and to her consternation, she felt her eyes flushing up
with tears. She tried to blink them away, but they came too fast.
Presently he stopped short in his walk—stopped talking, with a gasp, in
the middle of a sentence, and looked into her face. She couldn't see his
clearly, but she saw his hands clench and heard him draw a long breath.
Then he turned abruptly and walked to the window and for a mortal endless
minute, there was a silence.
At last she found something—it didn't matter much what—to say, and the
conversation between them, on the surface of it, was just what it had been
for the first ten minutes after he had come in. But, paradoxically, this
superficial commonplaceness only heightened the tensity of the thing that
underlay it. Something had happened during that moment while he stood
looking into her tear-flushed eyes; something momentous, critical, which no
previous experience in her life had prepared her for.
And it had happened to him, too. The memory of his silhouette as he
stood there with his hands clenched, between her and the window, would
have convinced her, had she needed convincing.
The commonplace thing she had found to say met, she knew, a need that
was his as well as hers, for breathing-space—for time for the recovery of
lost bearings. Had he not felt it as well as she—she smiled a little over this
—he wouldn't have yielded. The man on horseback would have taken an
obstacle like that without breaking the stride of his gallop.
What underlay her quiet meaningless chat, was wonder and fear, and
more deeply still, a sort of cosmic contentment—the acquiescence of a
swimmer in the still irresistible current of a mighty river.
It was distinctly a relief to her when her mother came in and, presently,
Portia. She introduced him to them, and then dropped out of the
conversation altogether. As if it were a long way off, she heard him retailing
last night's adventure and expressing his regret that he hadn't taken her to

Frederica (that was his sister, Mrs. Whitney) to be dried out, before he sent
her home.
She was aware that Portia stole a look at her in a puzzled penetrating sort
of way every now and then, but didn't concern herself as to the basis of her
curiosity. She knew that it was getting on toward their dinner-time, but
didn't disturb herself as to the effect Inga's premonitory rattlings out in the
dining-room might have on her guest. As a matter of fact, they had none
whatever.
She smiled once widely to herself, over a thought of the half-back. The
man here in the room with her now, chatting so pleasantly with her mother,
wouldn't ask for favors—would accept nothing that wasn't offered as
eagerly as it was sought.
It wasn't until he rose to go that she aroused herself and went with him
into the hall. There, after he'd got into his overcoat and hooked his stick
over his arm, he held out his hand to her in formal leave-taking. Only it
didn't turn out that way. For the effect of that warm lithe grip flew its flag in
both their faces.
"You're such a wonder!" he said.
She smiled. "So are y-you." It was the first time she had ever stammered
in her life.
When she came back into the sitting-room, she found Portia inclined to
be severe.
"Did you ask him to come again?" she wanted to know.
Rose smiled. "I never thought of it," she said.
"Perhaps it's just as well," said Portia. "Did you have anything at all to
say to him before we came home, or were you like that all the while? How
long ago did he come?"
"I don't know," said Rose behind a very real yawn. "I was asleep on the
couch when he came in. That's why I was dressed like this." And then she

said she was hungry.
There wasn't, on the whole, a happier person in the world at that moment.
Because Rodney Aldrich, pounding along at five miles an hour, in a
direction left to chance, was not happy. Or, if he was, he didn't know it. He
couldn't yield instantly, and easily, to his intuitions, as Rose had done. He
felt that he must think—felt that he had never stood in such dire need of
cool level consideration as at this moment:
But the process was impossible. That fine instrument of precision, his
mind, that had, for many years, done without complaint the work he gave it
to do, had simply gone on a strike. Instead of ratiocinating properly, it
presented pictures. Mainly four: a girl, flaming with indignation, holding a
street-car conductor pinned by the wrists; a girl in absurd bedroom slippers,
her skirt twisted around her knees, her hair a chaos, stretching herself
awake like a big cat; a girl with wonderful, blue, tear-brimming eyes, from
whose glory he had had to turn away. Last of all, the girl who had said with
that adorable stammer, "So are y-you," and smiled a smile that had summed
up everything that was desirable in the world.
It was late that night when his mind, in a dazed sort of way, came back on
the job. And the first thing it pointed out to him was that Frederica had
undoubtedly been right in telling him that, though they had lived together
off and on for thirty years, they didn't know each other. The pictures his
memory held of his sister, covered no such emotional range as these four.
Did Martin's? It seemed absurd, yet there was a strong intrinsic probability
of it.
Anyway, it was a remark Frederica had made last night that gave him
something to hold on by. Marriage, she had said, was an adventure, the
essential adventurousness of which no amount of cautious thought taken in
advance could modify. There was no doubt in his mind that marriage with
that girl would be a more wonderful adventure than any one had ever had in
the world.
All right then, perhaps his mind had been right in refusing to take up the
case. The one tremendous question,—would the adventure look promising

enough to her to induce her to embark on it?—was one which his own
reasoning powers could not be expected to answer. It called simply for
experiment.
So, turning off his mind again, with the electric light, he went to bed.

CHAPTER VII

HOW IT STRUCK PORTIA

It was just a fortnight later that Rose told her mother she was going to
marry Rodney Aldrich, thereby giving that lady a greater shock of surprise
than, hitherto, she had experienced in the sixty years of a tolerably eventful
life.
Rose found her neatly writing a paper at the boudoir desk in the little
room she called her den. And standing dutifully at her mother's side until
she saw the pen make a period, made then her momentous announcement,
much in the tone she would have used had it been to the effect that she was
going to the matinée with him that afternoon.
Mrs. Stanton said, "What, dear?" indifferently enough, just in mechanical
response to the matter-of-fact inflection of Rosalind's voice. Then she laid
down her pen, smiled in a puzzled way up into her daughter's face, and
added, "My ears must have played me a funny trick. What did you say?"
Rose repeated: "Rodney Aldrich and I are going to be married."
But when she saw a look of painful incomprehension in her mother's
face, she sat down on the arm of the chair, slid a strong arm around the

fragile figure and hugged it up against herself.
"I suppose," she observed contritely, "that I ought to have broken it more
gradually. But I never think of things like that."
As well as she could, her mother resisted the embrace.
"I can't believe," she said, gripping the edge of her desk with both hands,
"that you would jest about a solemn subject like that, Rose, and yet it's
incredible!... How many times have you seen him?"
"Oh, lots of times," Rose assured her, and began checking them off on her
fingers. "There was the first time, in the street-car, and the time he brought
the books back, and that other awful call he made one evening, when we
were all so suffocatingly polite. You know about those times. But three or
four times more, he's come down to the university—he's great friends with
several men in the law faculty, so he's there quite a lot, anyway—but
several times he's picked me up, and we've gone for walks, miles and miles
and miles, and we've talked and talked and talked. So really, we know each
other awfully well."
"I didn't know," said her mother in a voice still dull with astonishment,
"that you even liked him. You've been so silent—indifferent—both times he
was here to call...."
"Oh, I haven't learned yet to talk to him when any one else is around,"
Rose admitted. "There's so little to say, and it doesn't seem worth the bother.
But, truly, I do like him, mother. I like everything about him. I love his
looks—I don't mean just his eyes and nose and mouth. I like the shape of
his ears, and his hands. I like his big loud voice"—her own broadened a
little as she added, "and the way he swears. Oh, not at me, mother! Just
when he gets so interested in what he's saying that he forgets I'm a lady.
"And I like the way he likes to fight—not with his fists, I mean,
necessarily. He's got the most wonderful mind to—wrestle with, you know.
I love to start an argument with him, just to see how easy it is for him to—
roll me in the dirt and walk all over me."

The mother freed herself from the girl's embrace, rose and walked away
to another chair. "If you'll talk rationally and seriously, my dear," she said,
"we can continue the conversation. But this flippant, rather—vulgar tone
you're taking, pains me very much."
The girl flushed to the hair. "I didn't know I was being flippant and
vulgar," she said. "I didn't mean to be. I was just trying to tell you—all
about it."
"You've told me," said her mother, "that Mr. Aldrich has asked you to
marry him and that you've consented. It seems to me you have done so
hastily and thoughtlessly. He's told you he loves you, I've no doubt, but I
don't see how it's possible for you to feel sure on such short acquaintance."
"Why, of course he's told me," Rose said, a little bewildered. "He can't
help telling me all the time, any more than I can help telling him. We're—
rather mad about each other, really. I think he's the most wonderful person
in the world, and"—she smiled a little uncertainly—"he thinks I am. But
we've tried to be sensible about it, and think it out reasonably. We're both
strong and healthy, and we like each other.... I mean—things about each
other, like I've said. So, as far as we can tell, we—fit. He said he couldn't
guarantee that we'd be happy; that no pair of people could be sure of that till
they'd tried. But he said it looked to him like the most wonderful,
magnificent adventure in the world, and asked if it looked to me like that,
and I said it did. Because it's true. It's the only thing in the world that seems
worth—bothering about. And we both think—though, of course, we can't be
sure we're thinking straight—that we've got a good chance to make it go."
Even her mother's bewildered ears couldn't distrust the sincerity with
which the girl had spoken. But this only increased the bewilderment. She
had listened with a sort of incredulous distaste she couldn't keep her face
from showing, and at last she had to wipe away her tears.
At that Rose came over to her, dropped on the floor at her knees and
embraced her.
"I guess perhaps I understand, mother," she said. "I didn't realize—you've
always been so intellectual and advanced—that you'd feel that way about it

—be shocked because I hadn't pretended not to care for him and been shy
and coy"—in spite of herself, her voice got an edge of humor in it—"and a
startled fawn, you know, running away, but just not fast enough so that he
wouldn't come running after and think he'd made a wonderful conquest by
catching me at last. But a man like Rodney Aldrich wouldn't plead and
protest, mother. He wouldn't want me unless I wanted him just as much."
It was a long time before her mother spoke and when she did, she spoke
humbly—resignedly, as if admitting that the situation she was confronted
with was beyond her powers.
"It's the one need of a woman's life, Rose, dear," she said, "—the corner-
stone of all her happiness, that her husband, as you say, 'wants' her. It's
something that—not in words, of course, but in all the little facts of married
life—she'll need to be reassured about every day. Doubt of it is the one
thing that will have the power to make her bitterly unhappy. That's why it
seems to me so terribly necessary that she be sure about it before it's too
late."
"Yes, of course," said Rose. "But that's true of the man, too, isn't it?
Otherwise, where's the equality?"
Her mother couldn't answer that except with a long sigh.
Strangely enough, it wasn't until after Rose had gone away, and she had
shut herself up in her room to think, that any other aspect of the situation
occurred to her—even that there was another aspect of it which she'd
naturally have expected to be the first and only critical one.
Ever since babyhood Rose had been devoted, by all her mother's plans
and hopes, to the furtherance of the cause of Woman, whose ardent
champion she herself had always been. For Rose—not Portia—was the
devoted one.
The elder daughter had been born at a time when her own activities were
at their height. As Portia herself had said, when she and her two brothers
were little, their mother had been too busy to—luxuriate in them very much
and during those early and possibly suggestible years, Portia had been

suffered to grow up, as it were, by herself. She was not neglected, of course,
and she was dearly loved. But when, for the first time since actual
babyhood, she got into the focal-plane of her mother's mind again, there
was a subtle, but, it seemed, ineradicable antagonism between them, though
that perhaps is too strong a word for it. A difference there was, anyway, in
the grain of their two minds, that hindered unreserved confidences, no
matter how hard they might try for them. Portia's brusk disdain of rhetoric,
her habit of reducing questions to their least denominator of common sense,
carried a constant and perfectly involuntary criticism of her mother's ampler
and more emotional style—made her suspect that Portia regarded her as a
sentimentalist.
But Rose, with her first adorable smile, had captured her mother's heart
beyond the possibility of reservation or restraint. And, as the child grew and
her splendid, exuberant vitality and courage and wide-reaching, though not
facile, affection became marked characteristics, the hope grew in her
mother that here was a new leader born to the great Cause. It would need
new leaders. She herself was conscious of a side drift to the great current,
that threatened to leave her in a backwater. Or, as she put it to herself, that
threatened to sweep over the banks of righteousness and decorum, and
inundate, disastrously, the peaceful fields.
She couldn't expect to have the strength to resist this drift herself, but she
had a vision of her daughter rising splendidly to the task. And for that task
she trained her—or thought she did; saw to it that the girl understood the
Eighteenth Century Liberalism, which, limited to the fields of politics and
education, and extended to include women equally with men, was the
gospel of the movement she had grown up in. With it for a background,
with a university education and a legal training, the girl would have
everything she needed.
She expected her to marry, of course. But in her day-dreams, it was to be
one of Rose's converts to the cause—won perhaps by her advocacy at the
bar, of some legal case involving the rights of woman—who was to lay his
new-born conviction, along with his personal adoration, at the girl's feet.

Certainly Rodney Aldrich, who, as Rose outrageously had boasted, rolled
her in the dust and tramped all over her in the course of their arguments,
presented a violent contrast to the ideal husband she had selected. Indeed, it
should be hard to think of him as anything but the rock on which her whole
ambition for the girl would be shattered.
It was strange she hadn't thought of that during her talk with Rose!
Now that the idea had occurred to her she tried hard to look at the event
that way and to nurse into energetic life a tragic regret over the miscarriage
of a lifetime's hope. It was all so obviously what she ought to feel. Yet the
moment she relaxed the effort, her mind flew back to a vibration between a
hope and a fear: the hope, that the man Rose was about to marry would
shelter and protect her always, as tenderly as she herself had sheltered her;
the terror—and this was stronger—that he might not.
That night, during the process of getting ready for bed, Rose put on a
bath-robe, picked up her hair brush and went into Portia's room. Portia,
much quicker always about such matters, was already on the point of
turning out the light, but guessing what her sister wanted, she stacked her
pillows, lighted a cigarette, climbed into bed and settled back comfortably
for a chat.
"I hope," Rose began, "that you're really pleased about it. Because mother
isn't. She's terribly unhappy. Do you suppose it's because she thinks I've—
well, sort of deserted her, in not going on and being a lawyer—and all
that?"
"Oh, perhaps," said Portia indifferently. "I wouldn't worry about that,
though. Because really, child, you had no more chance of growing up to be
a lawyer and a leader of the 'Cause' than I have of getting to be a brigadier-
general."
Rose stopped brushing her hair and demanded to be told why not. She
had been getting on all right up to now, hadn't she?
"Why, just think," said Portia, "what mother herself had gone through
when she was your age; put herself through college because her father

didn't believe in 'higher education'—practically disowned her. She'd taught
six months in that awful school—remember?—she was used to being
abused and ridiculed. And she was working hard enough to have killed a
camel. But you!... Why, Lamb, you've never really had to do anything in
your life. If you felt like it, all right—and equally all right if you didn't.
You've never been hurt—never even been frightened. You wouldn't know
what they felt like. And the result is ..."
Portia drew in a long puff, then eyed her cigarette thoughtfully through
the slowly expelled smoke. "The result is," she concluded, "that you have
grown up into a big, splendid, fearless, confiding creature that it's perfectly
inevitable some man like Rodney Aldrich would go straight out of his head
about. And there you are."
A troubled questioning look came into the younger sister's eyes. "I've
been lazy and selfish, I know," she said. "Perhaps more than I thought. I
haven't meant to be. But ... Do you think I'm any good at all?"
"That's the real injustice of it," said Portia; "that you are. You've stayed
big and simple. It couldn't possibly occur to you now to say to yourself,
'Poor old Portia! She's always been jealous because mother liked me best,
and now she's just green with envy because I'm going to marry Rodney
Aldrich.'"
She wouldn't stop to hear Rose's protest. "I know it couldn't," she went
on. "That's what I say. And yet there's more than a little truth in it, I
suppose. Oh, I don't mean I'm sorry you're going to be happy—I believe
you are, you know. I'm just a little sorry for myself. Curious, anyway, to see
where I've missed all the big important things you've kept. I've been afraid
of my instincts, I suppose. Never able to take a leap because I've always
stopped to look, first. I'm too narrow between the cheek-bones, perhaps.
Anyhow, here I stay, grinding along, wondering what it's all about and what
after all's the use.... While you, you baby! are going to find out."
What Rose wanted to do was to gather her sister up in her arms and kiss
her. But the faint ironic smile on Portia's fine lips, the twist of her
eyebrows, the poise of her body as she sat up in bed watching the blue-

brown smoke rising in a straight thin line from her diminishing cigarette,
combined to make such a demonstration altogether impossible.
"Mother thinks, I guess," she said, to break the silence, "that I ought to
have looked a little longer. She thinks Rodney would have 'wanted' me
more, if I hadn't thrown myself at him like that."
Portia extinguished her cigarette in a little ash-tray, and began unpacking
her pillows before she spoke. "I don't know," she said at last. "It's been said
for a long time that the only way to make a man want anything very wildly,
is to make him think it's desperately hard to get. But I suspect there are
other ways. I don't believe you'll ever have any trouble making him 'want'
you as much as you like."
The color kept mounting higher and higher in the girl's face during the
moment of silence while she pondered this remark. "Why should I—make
him want me?—Any more than ... I think that's rather—horrid, Portia."
Portia gave a little shiver and huddled down into her blankets. "You don't
put things out of existence by deciding they're horrid, child," she said.
"Open my window, will you? And throw out that cigarette. There. Now, kiss
me and run along to bye-bye. And forget my nonsense."

CHAPTER VIII

RODNEY'S EXPERIMENT

The wedding was set for the first week in June. And the decision,
instantly acquiesced in by everybody, was that it was to be as quiet—as
strictly a family affair—as possible. The recentness of the death of Rodney's

mother gave an adequate excuse for such an arrangement, but the
comparative narrowness of the Stantons' domestic resources enforced it.
Indeed, the notion of even a simple wedding into the Aldrich family left
Portia rather aghast.
But this feeling was largely allayed by Frederica's first call. Being a
celebrated beauty and a person of great social consequence didn't, it
appeared, prevent one from being human and simple mannered and
altogether delightful to have about. She was so competent, too, and
intelligent (Rose didn't see why Portia should find anything extraordinary in
all this. Wasn't she Rodney's sister?) that her conquest of the Stanton family
was instantaneous. They didn't suspect that it was deliberate.
Rodney had made his great announcement to her, characteristically, over
the telephone, from his office. "Do you remember asking me, Freddy, two
or three weeks ago, who Rosalind Stanton was? Well, she's the girl I'm
going to marry."
She refused to hear a word more in those circumstances. "I'm coming
straight down," she said, "and we'll go somewhere for lunch. Don't you
realize that we can't talk about it like this? Of course you wouldn't, but it's
so."
Over the lunch table she got as detailed an account of the affair as
Rodney, in his somnambulistic condition, was able to give her, and she
passed it on to Martin that evening as they drove across to the north side for
dinner.
"Well, that all sounds exactly like Rodney," he commented. "I hope you'll
like the girl."
"That isn't what I hope," said Frederica. "At least it isn't what I'm most
concerned about. I hope I can make her like me. Roddy's the only brother
I've got in the world, and I'm not going to lose him if I can help it. That's
what will happen if she doesn't like me."
Frederica was perfectly clear about this, though she admitted it had taken
her fifteen minutes or so to see it.

"All the way down-town to talk to Rodney," she said, "I sat there
deciding what she ought to be like—as if she were going to be brought up
to me to see if she'd do. And then all at once I thought, what good would it
do me to decide that she wouldn't? I couldn't change his relation to her one
bit. But, if she decides I won't do, she can change his relation to me pretty
completely. It's about the easiest thing a wife can do.
"Well, I'm going to see her, and her mother and sister—that's the family
—to-morrow. And if they don't like me before I come away and think of me
as a nice sort of person to be related by marriage to, it won't be because I
haven't tried. It will be because I'm just a naturally repulsive person and
can't help it."
As it happened though, she forgot all about her resolution almost with her
first look at Rose. Rodney's attempts at description of her had been well
meaning; but what he had prepared his sister for, unconsciously of course,
in his emphasis on one or two phases of their first acquaintance, had been a
sort of slatternly Amazon. But the effect of this was, really, very happy;
because when a perfectly presentably clad, well-bred, admirably poised
young girl came into the room and greeted her neither shyly nor eagerly,
nor with any affectation of ease, a girl who didn't try to pretend it wasn't a
critical moment for her but was game enough to meet it without any
evidences of panic—when Frederica realized that this was the Rose whom
Rodney had been telling her about, she fell in love with her on the spot.
Amazingly, as she watched the girl and heard her talk, she found she was
considering, not Rose's availability as a wife for Rodney, but Rodney's as a
husband for her. It was this, perhaps, that led her to say, at the end of her
leave-taking, just as Rose, who had come out into the hall with her, was
opening the door:
"Roddy has been such a wonderful brother, always, to me, that I suspect
you'll find him, sometimes, being a brother to you. Don't let it hurt you if
that happens."
The most vivid of all the memories that Frederica took away with her
from that memorable visit was the smile with which Rose had answered

that remark. She had her chauffeur stop at the first drug store they came to
and called up Rodney on the telephone, just because she was too impatient
to wait any longer for a talk with him.
"I'm simply idiotic about her," she told him. "I know, now, what you
meant when you were trying to tell me about her smile. She looked at me
like that just as I was leaving, and my throat's tight with it yet. She's such a
darling! Don't be too much annoyed if I put my oar in once in a while, just
to see that you're treating her properly."
She walked into his office one morning a few days later, dismissed his
stenographer with a nod, and sat down in the just vacated chair. She was
sorry, she said, but it was the only way she had left, nowadays, of getting
hold of him. Then she introduced a trivial, transparent little errand for an
excuse, and, having got it out of the way, inquired after Rose. What had the
two of them been doing lately?
"Getting acquainted," he said. "It's going to be an endless process,
apparently. Heavens, what a lot there is to talk about!"
"Yes," Frederica persisted, "but what do you do by way of being—nice to
her?" And as he only looked puzzled and rather unhappy, she elucidated
further. "What's your concession, dear old stupid, to the fact that you're her
lover—in the way of presents and flowers and theaters and things?"
"But Rose isn't like the rest of them," he objected. "She doesn't care
anything about that sort of thing."
Whereat Frederica laughed. "Try it," she said, "just for an experiment,
Roddy. Don't ask her if she wants to go, ask her to go. Get tickets for one of
the musical things, engage a table for dinner and for supper, at two of the
restaurants, and send her flowers. Do it handsomely, you know, as if
ordinary things weren't good enough for her. Oh, and take our big car. Taxis
wouldn't quite be in the picture. Try it, Roddy, just to see what happens."
He looked thoughtful at first, then interested, and at last he smiled,
reached over and patted her hand. "All right, Freddy," he said. "The
handsome thing shall be done."

The result was that at a quarter past one A.M., a night or two later, he
tipped the carriageman at the entrance to the smartest of Chicago's supper
restaurants, stepped into Martin's biggest limousine, and dropped back on
the cushions beside a girl he hardly knew.
"You wonder!" he said, as her hand slid into his. "I didn't know you could
shine like that. All the evening you've kept my heart in my throat. I don't
know a thing we've seen or eaten—hardly where we've been."
"I do," she declared, "and I shall never forget it. Not one smallest thing
about it. You see, it's the first time anything like it ever happened to me."
He exclaimed incredulously at that—wanted to know what she meant.
He felt the weight of her relaxed contented body, as she leaned closer to
him—felt her draw in a long slow sigh. "I don't know whether I can talk
sense to-night or not," she said, "but I'll try. Why, I've been quite a lot at the
theater, of course, and two or three times to the restaurants. But never—oh,
as if I belonged like that. It always seemed a little wrong, and extravagant.
And then, it's never lasted. After the theater, or the dinner, I've walked over
to the elevated, you know. So this has been like—well, like flying in a
dream, without any bumps to wake me up. It sort of goes to my head just to
be sitting here like this, floating along home. Only—only, I wish it was to
our home, Rodney, instead of just mine."
"You darling!" he said. And, presently: "I'll tell you what we'll do to-
morrow, if you'll run away from your dressmaker. We'll go and buy a car for
ourselves. It's ridiculous I didn't get one long ago. Frederica's always been
at me to. You see, mother wouldn't have anything but horses, and I sold
those, of course, when she died. I've meant to get a car, but I just never got
round to it."
A small disagreeable voice, hermetically sealed in one of the remoter
caverns of him, remarked at this point that he was a liar. A motor-car, it
pointed out, was one of the things he had always denounced as a part of the
useless clutter of existence that he refused to be embarrassed with. But it
didn't speak with much conviction.

She picked up his hand and brushed her lips softly against the palm of it.
"You're so wonderful to me," she said. "You give me so much. And I—I
have so little to give back. And I want to—I want to give you all the world."
And then, suddenly, she put her bare arm around his neck, drew his face to
hers and kissed him.
It was the first time she had ever begun a caress like that.

CHAPTER IX

AFTER BREAKFAST

For their honeymoon, Martin had loaned them his camp up in northern
Wisconsin—uncut forest mostly, with a river and a lot of little lakes in it.
There were still deer and bear to be shot there, there was wonderful fishing,
and, more to the point in the present instance, as fine a brand of solitude as
civilization can ask to lay its hands on. It was modified, and mitigated too,
by a backwoods family—a man and his wife, a daughter or two, and half a
dozen sons, who lived there the year round, of course; so that by
telegraphing two or three days in advance, you could be met by a
buckboard at the nearest railroad station for the twenty-five-mile drive over
to the camp. You could find the house itself (a huge affair, decorously built
of logs, as far as its exterior manifestations went, but amply supplied on the
interior with bathrooms, real beds and so forth) opened and warmed and
flavored with the odor of fried venison steak. Also, there was always a boy
to paddle a canoe for you, or saddle a horse, if you didn't feel like doing it
for yourself.

Rodney and Rose spent a night in this establishment, then rigged up an
outfit for camping of a less symbolistic sort, and repaired to an island out in
the lake, where for two weeks they lived gorgeously, like the savages they
both, to a very considerable extent, really were.
But, at the end of this fortnight, a whipping north wind, with a fine
penetrating rain in its teeth, settled down for a three-days' visit, and drove
them back to adequate shelter. One rainy day in an outdoor camp is a good
thing; a second requires fortitude; a third carries the conviction that it has
been raining from the first day of Creation and will keep on till the Last
Judgment, and if you have anywhere to go to get dry, you do.
Of course the storm blew itself away when it had accomplished its
purpose of driving them from their island paradise, but they didn't go back
to it. Two weeks of camp-fires, hemlock boughs and blankets, had given
them an appreciation for sleeping between smooth sheets, and coming down
to a breakfast that was prepared for them. And one morning Rose came into
the big living-room to find Rodney lounging there, in front of the fire, with
a book.
It wasn't the first time he had done that. But always before, on seeing her
come in, he had chucked the book away and come to meet her. This time, he
went on reading.
She moved over toward him, meaning to sit down on the arm of his chair,
cuddle her arm around his neck, and at the same time, discover what it was
that so absorbed him. But half-way across the room, she changed her mind.
He hadn't even reached out an unconscious hand toward her. He went on
reading as if, actually, he were alone in the room. Evidently, too, it was a
book he'd brought with him—a formidable-looking volume printed in
German—she got near enough to see that. So she picked up an old
magazine from the table, and found a chair of her own, smiling a little in
anticipation of the effect this maneuver would have.
She opened the magazine at random, and, presently, for the sake of
verisimilitude, turned a page. Rodney was turning pages as regularly as
clockwork. It was a silly magazine! She wished she'd found something that

really could interest her. It was getting harder and harder to sit still. He
couldn't be angry about anything, could he? No, that was absurd. There
hadn't been the slightest trace of a disagreement between them. She
wouldn't go on pretending to read, anyhow, and she tossed the magazine
away.
She had meant it to fall back on the table. But she put more nervous force
than she realized into the toss, so that it skittered across the table and fell on
the floor with a slap.
That roused him. He closed his book—on his finger, though—looked
around at her, stretched his arms and smiled. "Isn't this great?" he said.
It wasn't a sentiment she could echo quite whole-heartedly just then, so
she asked him what he meant—wasn't what great.
"Oh, this," he told her. "Being like this."
"Sitting half a mile apart this way," she asked, "each of us reading our
own book?"
She didn't realize how completely provocative her meaning was, until, to
her incredulous bewilderment, he said enthusiastically, "Yes! exactly!"
He wasn't looking at her now, but into the fire, and he rummaged for a
match and relighted his pipe before he said anything more. "Being
permanent, you know," he explained, "and—well, our real selves again."
She tried hard to keep her voice even when she asked, "But—but what
have we been?"
And at that he laughed out. "Good heavens, what haven't we been! A
couple of transfigured lunatics. Why, Rose, I haven't been able to see
straight, or think straight, for the last six weeks. And I don't believe you
have either. My ideas have just been running in circles around you. How I
ever got through those last two cases in the Appellate Court, I don't see.
When I made an argument before the bench, I was—talking to you. When I
wrote my briefs, I was writing you love-letters. And if I'd had sense enough
to realize my condition, I'd have been frightened to death. But now—well,

we've been sitting here reading away for an hour, without having an idea of
each other in our heads."
By a miracle of self-command, she managed to keep control of her voice.
"Yes," she said. "That—that other's all over, isn't it?"
"I wouldn't go so far as to say that," he demurred around a comfortable
yawn. "I expect it will catch us again every now and then. But, in the main,
we're sane people, ready to go on with our own business. What was it you
were reading?"
"I don't believe I'll read any more just now," she said. "I think I'll go out
for a walk." And she managed to get outside the room without his
discovering that anything was wrong.
It was, indeed, her first preoccupation, to make sure he shouldn't discover
the effect his words had had on her—to get far enough away before the
storm broke so that she could have it out by herself. The crowning
humiliation would be if he came blundering in on her and asked her what
was the matter.
She fled down the trail to the little lake, ran out a canoe, caught up a
paddle and bent a feverish energy to the task of getting safely around into
the shelter of a fir-grown point before she let herself stop, as she would
have said, to think. It wasn't really to think, of course. Not, that is, to
interpret out to the end of all its logical implications, the admission he had
so unconsciously made to her that morning.
She had never seriously been hurt or frightened, Portia had said weeks
ago. And when she said it, it was true. She was both hurt and frightened
now, and the instinct that had urged her to fly was as simple and primitive
as that which urges a wounded animal to hide.
Indeed, if you could have seen her after she had swung her paddle
inboard, sitting there, gripping the gunwales with both hands, panting, her
wide eyes dry, you might easily have thought of some defenseless wild
thing cowering in a momentary shelter, listening for the baying of pursuing
hounds.

He didn't love her any more, that was what he had said. For what was the
thing he had so cheerfully described himself as cured of, what were the
symptoms he had enumerated as if he had been talking about a disease—the
obsession with her, the inability to get her further away than the middle
ground of his thoughts, and then only temporarily; the necessity of saying
everything he said and doing everything he did, with reference to her; the
fact that his mind could focus itself sharply on nothing in the world but just
herself?—What was all that but the veritable description, though in hostile
terms, of the love he had promised to feel for her till death should—part
them; of the very love she felt for him, this moment stronger than ever?
Recurrent waves of the panic broke over her, during which she would
catch up her paddle again and drive ahead, blindly, without any conscious
knowledge of where she was going. And in the intervals, she drifted.
The relief of tears didn't come to her until she saw, just ahead, the island
where, for two paradisiacal weeks, she and Rodney had made their camp.
Here she beached her canoe and went ashore; crept into a little natural
shelter under a jutting rock, where they had lain one day while, for three
hours, a violent unheralded storm had whipped the lake to lather. The heap
of hemlock branches he had cut for a couch for them was still there.
At the end of half an hour, she observed with a sort of apathetic
satisfaction, that the weather conditions of their former visit were going to
be repeated now—a sudden darkness, a shriek of wind, a wild squall
flashing across the surface of the little lake, and a driving rain so thick that
small as the lake was, it veiled the shore of it.
She watched it for an hour before it occurred to her to wonder what
Rodney would be doing—whether he'd have discovered her absence from
the house and begun to worry about her. She told herself that he wouldn't—
that he'd sit there until he finished his book, or until they called him for
lunch, without, as he himself had boasted that morning, a thought of her
entering his mind.
She wept again over this notion, luxuriating rather, it must be confessed,
in the pathos of it, until she caught herself in the act and, disgustedly, dried

her eyes. Of course he'd worry about her. Only there was nothing either of
them could do about it until the storm should be over; then she'd paddle
back to the house as fast as she could and set his mind at rest.
Suddenly she sat erect, looked, rubbed her eyes, looked again, then
sprang to her feet and went out into the driving rain. A spot of white, a
larger one of black, two moving pin-points of light, was what she saw. The
white was Rodney's shirt, the black the canoe, the pin-points the reflection
from the two-bladed paddle as, recklessly, he forced his way with it into the
teeth of the storm. He wanted her, after all.
So, with a racing heart and flushed cheeks, she watched him. It was not
until he had come much nearer that she went white with the realization of
his danger—not until she could see how desperately it needed all his
strength and skill to keep his little cockle-shell from broaching to and being
swamped.

"Oh, my dear! I didn't know!"

She went as far to meet him as she could—out to the end of the point, and
then actually into the water to help him with the half-filled boat.
They emptied it and hauled it up on the beach. Then, looking up at him a
little tremulously, between a smile and tears, she saw how white he was,
caught him in her arms and felt how he was trembling.
"I thought you were gone," he said, but couldn't manage any more than
that because of a great shuddering sob that stopped him.
"Don't!" she cried. "Don't.—Oh, my dear! I didn't know!"
Presently, back in the shelter again, she drew his head down on her breast
and held him tight.

Logically, of course, the situation wasn't essentially changed. It couldn't
be a part of their daily married routine that he should think he'd lost her and
come through perils to the rescue. When the storm had blown over and
they'd come back to the house—still more, when after another few weeks
they'd gone back to town, he'd still have a world of his own to withdraw
into, a business of his own to absorb him, and she, with no world at all
except the one he was the principal inhabitant of, would be left outside. But
you couldn't have expected her to think of that while she held him,
quivering, in her arms.

BOOK TWO

Love and the World

CHAPTER I

THE PRINCESS CINDERELLA

When the society editor of "America's foremost newspaper," as in its
trademark it proclaims itself to be, announced that the Rodney Aldriches
had taken the Allison McCreas' house, furnished, for a year, beginning in
October, she spoke of it as an ideal arrangement. As everybody knew, it was
an ideal house for a young married couple, and it was equally evident that
the Rodney Aldriches were an ideal couple for it.

In the sense that it left nothing to further realization, it was an ideal
house; an old house in the Chicago sense, built over into something very
much older still—Tudor, perhaps—Jacobean, anyway—by a smart young
society architect who wore soft collars and an uptwisted mustache, and
who, by a perfectly reciprocal arrangement which almost deserves to be
called a form of perpetual motion, owed the fact that he was an architect to
his social position, and maintained his social position by being an architect.
He had cooperated enthusiastically with Florence McCrea, not only in the
design of the house, but in the supplementary matters of furniture,
hangings, rugs and pictures, with the effect that the establishment presented
the last politely spoken word in things as they ought to be. The period
furniture was accurate almost to the minute, and the arrangement of it, the
color schemes and the lighting, had at once the finality of perfection and the
perfection of finality. If you happened to like that sort of thing, it was
precisely the sort of thing you'd like.
The same sort of neat, fully acquired perfection characterized the
McCreas' domestic arrangements. Allison McCrea's income, combined with
his wife's, was exactly enough to enable them to live in this house and
entertain on the scale it very definitely prescribed, just half the time. Every
other year they went off around the world in one direction or another, and
rented their house furnished for exactly enough to pay all their expenses.
They had no children, and his business, which consisted in allowing his
bank to collect his invariable quarterly dividends for him and credit them to
his account, offered no obstacle to this arrangement. On the alternate years,
they came back and spent two years' income living in their house.
Florence was an old friend of Rodney's and it was her notion that it would
be just the thing he'd want. She made no professions of altruism—admitted
she was fussy about whom she rented her darling house to, and that Rodney
and his wife would be exactly right. Still, she didn't believe he could do
better. They'd have to have some sort of place to live in, in the autumn. It
would be such a mistake to buy a lot of stuff in a hurry and find out later
that they didn't want it! The arrangement she proposed would leave him an
idyllically untroubled summer—nothing to fuss about, and provide ... Well,

Rodney knew for himself what the house was—complete down to the cork-
screws.
Even the servant question was eliminated. "Ours are so good," Florence
said, "that the last time we rented the house, we put them in the lease. I
wouldn't do that with you, of course, but I know they'll be just what you
want." And six thousand dollars a year was simply dirt cheap.
To clinch the thing, Florence went around and saw Frederica about it.
And Frederica, after listening, non-committally, dashed off to the last
meeting of the Thursday Club (all this happened in June, just before the
wedding) and talked the matter over with Violet Williamson on the way
home, afterward.
"John said once," observed Violet, "that if he had to live in that house,
he'd either go out and buy a plush Morris chair from feather-your-nest
Saltzman's, and a golden oak sideboard, or else run amuck."
Frederica grinned, but was sure it wouldn't affect Rodney that way. He'd
never notice that there wasn't a golden oak sideboard with a beveled mirror
in it. As for Rose, she thought Rose would like it—for a while, anyway. Of
course it wasn't forever. But this wasn't the point. It was something else she
had to get an unprejudiced opinion on, "simply because in this case my own
isn't trustworthy. I'm so foolish about old Roddy, that I can't be sure I
haven't—well, caught being mad about Rose from him. It all depends, you
see, on whether Rose is going to be a hit this winter or not. If she is, they'll
want a place just like that and it would be a shame for her to be bothered
and unsettled when she might have everything all oiled for her. But of
course if she doesn't—go (and it all depends on her; Rodney won't be much
help)—why, having a house like that might be pretty sad. So, if you're a true
friend, you'll tell me what you think."
"What I really think," said Violet, "—of course I suppose I'd say this
anyway, but I do honestly mean it—is that she'll be what John calls a
'knock-out.' To be sure, I've only met her twice, but I think she's absolutely
thrilling. She's so perfectly simple. She's never—don't you know—being
anything. She just is. And she thinks we're all so wonderful—clever and

witty and beautiful and all that—just honestly thinks so, that she'll make
everybody feel warm and nice inside, and they'll be sure to like her. Of
course, when she gets over feeling that way about us...."
"She's got a real eye for clothes, too," said Frederica. "We've been
shopping. Well then, I'm going to tell Rodney to go ahead and take the
house."
Rose was consulted about it of course, though consulted is perhaps not
the right word to use. She was taken to see it, anyway, and asked if she
liked it, a question in the nature of the case superfluous. One might as well
have asked Cinderella if she liked the gown the fairy godmother had
provided her with for the prince's ball.
It didn't occur to her to ask how much the rent would be, nor would the
fact have had any value for her as an illuminant, because she would have
had no idea whether six thousand dollars was a half or a hundredth of her
future husband's income. The new house was just a part—as so many of the
other things that had happened to her since that night when Rodney had sent
her flowers and taken her to the theater and two restaurants in Martin's
biggest limousine had been parts—of a breath-arresting fairy story.
It takes a consciousness of resistance overcome to make anything feel
quite real, and Rose, during the first three months after their return to town
in the autumn, encountered no resistance whatever. It was all, as Frederica
had said, oiled. She was asked to make no effort. The whole thing just
happened, exactly as it had happened to Cinderella. All she had to do was to
watch with wonder-wide eyes, and feel that she was, deliciously, being
floated along.
The conclusion Frederica and Violet had come to about her chance for
social success was amply justified by the event, and it is probable that
Violet had put her finger on the mainspring of it. One needn't assume that
there were not other young women at the prince's ball as beautiful as
Cinderella, and other gowns, perhaps, as marvelous as the one provided by
the fairy godmother. The godmother's greatest gift, I should say, though the
fable lays little stress on it, was a capacity for unalloyed delight. No other

young girl, beautiful as she may have been, if she were accustomed to
driving to balls in coaches and having princes ask her to dance with them,
could possibly have looked at that prince the way Cinderella must have
looked at him.
While a sophisticated woman can affect this sort of simplicity well
enough to take in the men, the affectation is always transparently clear to
other women and they detest her for it. But it was altogether the real thing
with Rose, and they knew it and took to her as naturally as the men did.
So it fell out that what with the Junior League, the woman's auxiliary
boards of one or two of the more respectably elect charities, the Thursday
Club and The Whifflers (this was the smallest and smartest organization of
the lot—fifteen or twenty young women supposed to combine and reconcile
social and intellectual brilliancy on even terms. They met at one another's
houses and read scintillating papers about nothing whatever under titles
selected generally from Through the Looking-glass or The Hunting of the
Snark)—what with all this, her days were quite as full as the evenings were,
when she and Rodney dined and went to the opera and paid fabulous prices
to queer professionals, to keep themselves abreast of the minute in all the
new dances.
But it wasn't merely the events of this sort, sitting in boxes at the opera
and going to marvelous supper dances afterward, that had this thrilling
quality of incredibility to Rose. The connective tissue of her life gave her
the same sensation, perhaps even more strongly.
Portia had been quite right in saying that she had never had to do
anything; the rallying of all her forces under the spur of necessity was an
experience she had never undergone. And it was also true that her mother,
and for that matter, Portia herself had spoiled her a lot—had run about
doing little things for her, come in and shut down her windows in the
morning, and opened the register, and on any sort of excuse, on a Saturday
morning, for example, had brought her her breakfast on a tray.
But these things had been favors, not services—never to be asked for, of
course, and always to be accepted a little apologetically. She never knew

what it was really to be served, until she and Rodney came back from their
camp in the woods. The whole mechanism of ringing bells for people,
telling them, quite courteously of course, but with no spare words, precisely
what she wanted them to do and seeing them, with no words at all of their
own, except the barest minimum required to indicate respectful
acquiescence—carrying out these instructions, was in its novelty, as
sensuously delightful a thing to her feelings as the contact with a fine fabric
was to her finger-tips.
"I haven't," Rose, in bed, told Rodney one morning, "a single, blessed,
mortal thing to do all day." Some fixture scheduled for that morning had
been moved, she went on to explain, and Eleanor Randolph was feeling
seedy and had called off a little luncheon and matinée party. So, she
concluded with a deep-drawn sigh, the day was empty.
"Oh, that's too bad," he said with concern. "Can't you manage something
...?"
"Too bad!" said Rose in lively dissent. "It's too heavenly! I've got a whole
day just to enjoy being myself;—being"—she reached across to the other
bed for his hand, and getting it, stroked her cheek with it—"being my new
self. You've no idea how new it is, or how exciting all the little things about
it are. State Street's so different now—going and getting the exact thing I
want, instead of finding something I can make do, and then faking it up to
look as much like the real thing as I could. Portia used to think I faked
pretty well. It was the one thing she really admired about me, because she
couldn't do it herself at all. But I never was—don't you know?—right.
"And then when I was going anywhere, I'd figure out the through routes
and where I'd take transfers, and how many blocks I'd have to walk, and
what kind of shoes I'd have to wear. And coming home in time for dinner
always meant the rush hour, and I'd have to stand. And it simply never
occurred to me that everybody else didn't do it that way. Except"—she
smiled—"except in Robert Chambers' novels and such."
It wasn't necessary to see Rose smile to know she did it. Her voice,
broadening out and—dimpling, betrayed the fact. This smile, plainly

enough, went rather below the surface, carried a reference to something.
But Rodney didn't interrupt. He let her go on and waited to inquire about it
later.
"So you see," she concluded, "it's quite an adventure just to say—well,
that I want the car at a quarter to eleven and to tell Otto exactly where I
want him to drive me to. I always feel as if I ought to say that if he'll just
stop the car at the corner of Diversey Street, I can walk."
He laughed out at that and asked her how long she thought this blissful
state of things would last.
"Forever," she said.
But presently she propped herself up on one elbow and looked over at
him rather thoughtfully. "Of course it's none of it new to you," she said
—"not the silly little things I've been talking about, nor the things we do
together—oh, the dinners, and the dances, and the operas. Do you sort of—
wish I'd get tired of it? Is it a dreadful bore to you?"
"So long as it doesn't bore you," he said; "so long as you go on—shining
the way you do over it, and I am where I can see you shine"—he got out of
his bed, sat down on the edge of hers, and took both her hands—"so long as
it's like that, you wonder," he said, "well, the dinners and the operas and all
that may be piffle, but I shall be blind to the fact."
She kissed his hands and told him contentedly that he was a darling. But,
after a moment's silence, a little frown puckered her eyebrows and she
asked him what he was so solemn about.
Well, he had told her the truth. The edge of excitement in his voice would
have carried the irresistible conviction to anybody, that the thing he had said
was, without reserve, the very thing he meant. But precisely as he said it, as
if, indeed, the thing that he had said were the detonating charge that fires
the shell, he felt the impact, away down in the inner depths of him, of a
realization that he was not the same man he had been six months ago. Not
the man who had tramped impatiently back and forth across Frederica's
drawing-room, expounding his ideals of space and leisure—open, wind-

swept space, for the free range of a hard, clean, athletic mind. Not the man
who despised the clutter of expensive junk—"so many things to have and to
do, that one couldn't turn around for fear of breaking something." That man
would have derided the possibility that he could ever say this thing that he,
still Rodney Aldrich, had just said to Rose—and meant.
To that man, the priceless hour of the day had always been precisely this
one, the first waking hour, when his mind, in the enjoyment of a sort of
clairvoyant limpidity, had been wont to challenge its stiffest problems,
wrestle with them, and whether triumphant or not, despatch him to his
office avid for the day's work and strides ahead of where he had left it the
night before.
He spent that hour very differently now. He spent all his hours, even the
formal working ones, differently. And the terrifying thing was that he hadn't
resisted the change, hadn't wanted to resist, didn't want to now, as he sat
there looking down at her—at the wonderful hair which framed her face
and, in its two thick braids, the incomparable whiteness of her throat and
bosom—at the slumberous glory of her eyes.
So, when she asked him what he was looking so solemn about, he said
with more truth than he pretended to himself, that it was enough to make
anybody solemn to look at her. And then, to break the spell, he asked her
why she had laughed a little while back, over something she had said about
Robert W. Chambers' novels.
"I was thinking," she said, "of the awful disgrace I got into yesterday,
with somebody—well, with Bertram Willis, by saying something like that.
I'll have to tell you about it."
Bertram Willis, it should be said, was the young architect with the
upturned mustaches and the soft Byronic collars, who had done the house
for the McCreas. And I must warn you to take the adjective young, with a
grain of salt. Youth was no mere accident with him. He made an art of it,
just as he did of eating and drinking and love-making and, incidentally,
architecture. He was enormously in demand, chiefly perhaps, among young
married women whose respectability and social position were alike beyond

cavil. He never carried anything too far, you see. He was no pirate—a sort,
rather, of licensed privateer. And what made him so invincibly attractive—
after you had granted his other qualities, that is—was that he professed
himself, among women, exceedingly difficult to please, so that attentions
from him, even of a casual sort, became ex hypothesi compliments of the
first order. If he asked you, in his innocently shameless way, to belong to
his hareem, you boasted of it afterward;—jocularly, to be sure, but you felt
pleased just the same. The thing that had given the final cachet of
distinction to Rose's social success that season, had been the fact that he had
shown a disposition to flirt with her quite furiously.
Rose didn't need to tell her husband that, of course, because he knew it
already, as he also knew that Willis had asked her to be one of the Watteau
group he was getting up for the charity ball (the ball was to be a
sumptuously picturesque affair that year), nor that he had been spending
hours with her over the question of costumes—getting as good as he gave,
too, because her eye for clothes amounted to a really special talent.
All that Rodney didn't know, was about the conversation the two of them
had had yesterday afternoon at tea-time.
Rose, intent on telling him all about it, had postponed the recital while
she made up her own mind as to how she should regard the thing herself;
whether she ought to have been annoyed, or seriously remonstrant, or
whether the smile of pure amusement which had come so spontaneously to
her lips, had expressed, after all, an adequate emotion.
The look in her husband's face made an end of all doubts, reduced the
episode of yesterday to its proper scale. Married to a man who could look at
her like that, she needn't take any one else's looks or speeches very
seriously. It was at this angle that she told about it.
"Why," she said, "of course he's always talked to me as if I were about six
—sixteen, anyway, no older than that, and the names he makes up to call
me are simply too silly to repeat. But I never paid any attention, because—
well, everybody knows he's that way to everybody. 'Flower face' was one of
his favorites, but there were others that were worse. Well, yesterday he

brought around some old costume plates, but he wouldn't let me look at
them without coming round beside me and—holding my hand, so that didn't
work very well. And then he got quite solemn and said I'd—given him the
only real regret of his life, because he hadn't seen me until it was too late."
"I didn't know," said Rodney, "that he ever let obstacles like husbands
bother him."
"That's what I thought he meant at first," said Rose, "but it wasn't. He
didn't mean it was too late because of my being married to you. He meant
too late because of him. He couldn't love me, he said, as I deserved, because
he'd been in love so many times before, himself.
"And then, of course, just when I should have been looking awfully sad
and sympathetic, I had to go and grin, and he wanted to know why, and I
said, 'Nothing,' but he insisted, you know, so then I told him.
"Well, it was just what I said to you a while ago—that I didn't know any
men ever talked like that except in books by Hichens or Chambers—why
do you suppose they're both named Robert?—and he went perfectly purple
with rage and said I was a savage. And then he got madder still and said
he'd like to be a savage himself for about five minutes; and I wanted to tell
him to go ahead and try, and see what happened, but I didn't. I asked him
how he wanted his tea, and he didn't want it at all, and went away."
As she finished, she glanced up into his face for a hardly-needed
reassurance that the episode looked to him, as it had looked to her, trivial.
Then, with a contented little sigh, for his look gave her just what she
wanted, she sat up and slid her arms around his neck.
"How plumb ridiculous it would have been," she said, "if either of us had
married anybody else."
If Rodney, that is, had married a girl who'd have taken Bertram Willis
seriously; or if she had married a man capable of thinking the architect's
attentions important.

CHAPTER II

THE FIRST QUESTION AND AN ANSWER TO IT

But within a day or two, when a conversation overheard at a luncheon
table recalled the architect to her mind, a rather perplexing question
propounded itself to her. Why had it infuriated him so—why had he glared
at her with that air of astounded incredulity, on discovering that she wasn't
prepared to take him seriously? There could be only one answer to that
question. He could not have expected Rose to be properly impressed and
fluttered, unless that were the effect he was in the habit of producing on
other women. These others, much older that Rose all of them (because no
débutantes were ever invited to belong to the hareem), these new, brilliant,
sophisticated friends her marriage with Rodney had brought her, did not,
evidently, regard the dapper little architect with feelings anything like the
mild, faintly contemptuous mirth that he had roused so spontaneously and
irresistibly in Rose. Every one of them had a husband of her own, hadn't
she? And they were happily married, too. Well, then ...!
She found Violet Williamson in Frederica's box at the Symphony concert
one Friday afternoon, and took them both home to tea with her afterward.
And when the talk fairly got going, she tossed her problem about Bertie
Willis and his hareem into the vortex to see what would come of it.
It was always easy to talk with Frederica and Violet, there was so much
real affection under the amusement they freely expressed over her youth
and inexperience and simplicity. They always laughed at her, but they came
over and hugged her afterward.
"I'm turned out of the hareem," she said, apropos of the mention of him,
"in disgrace."

Violet wanted to know whatever in the world she had done to him.
"Because, he's been positively—what do you call it?—dithyrambic about
you for the last three months."
"I laughed," Rose acknowledged; "in the wrong place of course."
The two older women exchanged glances.
"Do you suppose it's ever been done to him before," asked Frederica, "in
the last fifteen years, anyway?" And Violet solemnly shook her head.
"But why?" demanded Rose. "That's what I want to know. How can any
one help thinking he's ridiculous. Of course if you were alone on a desert
island with him like the Bab Ballad, I suppose you'd make the best of him.
But with any one else that was—real, you know, around ..."
Only a very high vacuum—this was the idea Rose seemed to be getting at
—might be expected, faute de mieux, to tolerate Bertie. So if you found him
tolerated seriously in a woman's life, you couldn't resist the presumption
that there was a vacuum there.
"Don't ask me about him," said Frederica. "He never would have
anything to do with me; said I was a classic type and they always bored him
stiff. But Violet, here ..."
"Oh, yes," said Violet, "I lasted one season, and then he dropped me. He
beat me to it by about a minute. All the same—oh, I can understand it well
enough. You see, what he builds on is that a woman's husband is always the
least interesting man in the world. Oh, I don't mean we don't love them, or
that we want to change them—permanently, you know. Take Frederica and
me. We wouldn't exchange for anything. Yet, we used to have long
arguments. I've said that Martin was more—interesting, witty, you know,
and all that, than John. And Frederica says John is more interesting than
Martin. Oh, just to talk to, I mean. Not about anything in particular, but
when you haven't anything else to do."
She paused long enough to take a tentative sip or two of boiling hot tea.
But the way she had hung up the ending to her sentence, told them she
wasn't through with the topic yet.

"It's funny about that, too," she went on, "because really, we see each
other so much and have known each other so long, that I know Martin's—
repertory, about as well as Frederica. I mean, it isn't like Walter Mill, when
he was just back from the Legation at Pekin, or even like Jimmy Wallace,
who spends half his time playing around with all sorts of impossible people
—chorus-girls and such, and tells you queer stories about them. There's
something besides the—familiarness that makes husbands dull. And that's
what makes Bertie amusing."
"Oh, of course," said Frederica, "everybody likes to flirt—whether they
have to or not."
"Have to?" Rose echoed. She didn't want to miss anything.
Frederica hesitated. Then, rather tentatively, began her exegesis.
"Why, there are a lot of women—especially of our sort, I suppose, who
are always ... well, it's like taking your own temperature—sticking a
thermometer into their mouths and looking at it. They think they know how
they ought to feel about certain things, and they're always looking to see if
they do. And when they don't, they think their emotional natures are being
starved, or some silly thing like that. And of course, if you're that way,
you're always trying experiments, just the way people do with health foods.
In the end, they generally settle on Bertie. He's perfectly safe, you know—
just as anxious as they are not to do anything really outrageous. Bertie
keeps them in a pleasant sort of flutter, and maybe he does them good. I
don't know.—Drink your tea, Violet. We've got to run."
That was explicit enough anyway. But it didn't solve Rose's problem—
broadened and deepened it rather, and gave it a greater basis of reality. It
was silly, of course, always to be asking yourself questions. But after all,
you didn't question a thing that wasn't questionable. There had been no
necessity for a compromise between romance and reality in her own case.
She hadn't any need of a thermometer. Why had they?
Of course she knew well enough that marriage was not always the
blissful transformation it had been for her. There were unhappy marriages.
There were such things in the world as unfaithful husbands and brutal

drunken husbands, who had to be divorced. And equally, too, there were
cold-blooded, designing, mercenary wives. (In the back of her mind was the
unacknowledged notion that these people existed generally in novels. She
knew, of course, that those characters must have real prototypes
somewhere. Only, it hadn't occurred to her to identify them with people of
her own acquaintance.) But the idea had been that, barring these tragic and
disastrous types, marriage was a state whose happy satisfactoriness could,
more or less, be taken for granted.
Oh, there were bumps and bruises, of course. She hadn't forgotten that
tragic hour in the canoe last summer. There had, indeed, been two or three
minor variants on the same theme since. She had seen Rodney drop off now
and again into a scowling abstraction, during which it was so evident he
didn't want to talk to her, or even be reminded that she was about, that she
had gone away flushed and wondering, and needing an effort to hold back
the tears.
These weren't frequent occurrences, though. Once settled into what
apparently was going to be their winter's routine, they had so little time
alone together that these moments, when they came, had almost the tension
of those that unmarried lovers enjoy. They were something to look forward
to and make the delicious utmost of.
So, until she got to wondering about Bertie, Rose's instinctive attitude
toward the group of young to middle-aged married people into which her
own marriage had introduced her, was founded on the assumption that,
allowing for occasional exceptions, the husbands and wives felt toward
each other as she and Rodney did—were held together by the same
irresistible, unanalyzable attraction, could remember severally, their vivid
intoxicating hours, just as she remembered the hour when Rodney had told
her the story and the philosophy of his life.
Bertie, or rather the demand for what Bertie supplied, together with
Frederica's explanation of it, brought her the misgiving that marriage was
not, perhaps, even between people who loved each other,—between
husbands who were not "unfaithful" and wives who were not
"mercenary"—quite so simple as it seemed.

The misgiving was not very serious at first—half amused, and wholly
academic, because she hadn't, as yet, the remotest notion that the thing
concerned, or ever could concern, herself; but the point was, it formed a
nucleus, and the property of a nucleus is that it has the power of attracting
to itself particles out of the surrounding nebulous vapor. It grows as it
attracts, and it attracts more strongly as it grows.
An illustration of this principle is in the fact that, but for the misgiving,
she would hardly have asked Simone Gréville what she meant by saying
that though she had always supposed the fundamental sex attraction
between men and women to be the same in its essentials, in all epochs and
in all civilizations, her acquaintance with upper-class American women was
leading her to admit a possible exception.
Since that amiable celestial, Wu Ting Fang, made his survey of our
western civilization and left us wondering whether after all we had the right
name for it, no one has studied our leisured and cultivated classes with
more candor and penetration than this great Franco-Austrian actress. She
had ample opportunities for observation, because during the first week of
her tour the precise people who count the most in our informal social
hierarchy took her up and, upon examination, took her in. Playing in
English as she did, and with an American supporting company, she did not
make a great financial success (the Continental technique, especially when
contrasted so intimately with the one we are familiar with does not attract
us), but socially she was a sensation. So during her four weeks in Chicago,
while she played to houses that couldn't be dressed to look more than a third
full, she was enormously in demand for luncheons, teas, dinners, suppers,
Christmas bazaars, charity dances and so on. (If it had only been possible to
establish a scale of fees for these functions, her manager used to reflect
despairingly, he might have come out even after all.) Any other sort of
engagement melted away like snow in the face of an opportunity of meeting
Simone Gréville.
Rose had met her a number of times before the incident referred to
happened, but had always surveyed the lioness from afar. What could she,
whose acquaintance with Europe was limited to one three-months trip,

undertaken by the family during the summer after she graduated from high
school, have to say to an omniscient cosmopolite like that?
So she hung about, within ear-shot when it was possible, and watched,
leaving the active duties of entertainment to heavily cultured illuminati like
the Howard Wests, or to clever creatures like Hermione Woodruff and
Frederica, and Constance Crawford, whose French was good enough to fill
in the interstices in Madame Gréville's English.
She was standing about like that at a tea one afternoon, when she heard
the actress make the remark already quoted, to the effect that American
women seemed to her to be an exception to what she always supposed to be
the general law of sex attraction.
It was taken, by the rather tense little circle gathered around her, as a
compliment; exactly as, no doubt, Gréville intended it to be taken. But her
look flashed out beyond the confines of the circle and encountered a pair of
big luminous eyes, under brows that had a perplexed pucker in them.
Whereupon she laughed straight into Rose's face and said, lifting her head a
little, but not her voice:
"Come here, my child, and tell me who you are and why you were
looking at me like that."
Rose flushed, smiled that irresistible wide smile of hers, and came, not
frightened a bit, nor, exactly, embarrassed; certainly not into pretending she
was not surprised, and a little breathlessly at a loss what to say.
"I'm Rose Aldrich." She didn't, in words, say, "I'm just Rose Aldrich." It
was the little bend in her voice that carried that impression. "And I suppose
I was—looking that way, because I was wishing I knew exactly what you
meant by what you said."
Gréville's eyes, somehow, concentrated and intensified their gaze upon
the flushed young face; took a sort of plunge, so it seemed to Rose, to the
very depths of her own. It was an electrifying thing to have happen to you.
"Mon dieu," she said, "j'ai grande envie de vous le dire." She hesitated
the fraction of a moment, glanced at a tiny watch set in a ring upon the

middle finger of her right hand, took Rose by the arm as if to keep her from
getting away, and turned to her hostess.
"You must forgive me," she said, "if I make my farewells a little soon. I
am under orders to have some air each day before I go to the theater, and if
it is to be done to-day, it must be now. I am sorry. I have had a very pleasant
afternoon.—Make your farewells, also, my child," she concluded, turning to
her prisoner, "because you are going with me."
There was something Olympian about the way she did it. The excuse was
made, and the regret expressed in the interest of courtesy, but neither was
insisted on as a fact, nor was seriously intended, it appeared, even to
disguise the fact, which was simply that she had found something better
worth her while, for the moment, than that tea. It occurred to Rose that there
wasn't a woman in town—not even terrible old Mrs. Crawford, Constance's
mother-in-law, who could have done that thing in just that way; no one who
felt herself detached, or, in a sense, superior enough, to have done it without
a trace of self-consciousness, and consequently without offense. An
empress must do things a good deal like that.
The effect on Rose was to make complete frankness seem the easiest
thing in the world. And frankness seemed to be the thing called for. Because
no sooner were they seated in the actress' car and headed north along the
drive, than she, instead of answering Rose's question, repeated one of her
own.
"I ask who you are, and you say your name—Rose something. But that
tells me nothing. Who are you—one of them?"
"No, not exactly," said Rose. "Only by accident. The man I married is—
one of them, in a way. I mean, because of his family and all that. And so
they take me in."
"So you are married," said the French woman. "But not since long?"
"Six months," said Rose.
She said it so with the air of regarding it as a very considerable period of
time that Gréville laughed.

"But tell me about him then, this husband of yours. I saw him perhaps at
the tea this afternoon?"
Rose laughed. "No, he draws the line at teas," she said. "He says that
from seven o'clock on, until as late as I like, he's—game, you know—
willing to do whatever I like. But until seven, there are no—well, he says,
siren songs for him."
"Tell me—you will forgive the indiscretions of a stranger?—how has it
arrived that you married him? Was it one of your American romances?"
"It didn't seem very romantic," said Rose. "I mean not much like the
romantic stories you read, and of course one couldn't make a story about it,
because there was nothing to tell. We just happened to get acquainted, and
we knew almost straight off that we wanted to marry each other, so we did.
Some people thought it was a little—headlong, I suppose, but he said it was
an adventure anyway, and that people could never tell how it was going to
come out until they tried. So we tried, and—it came out very well."
"It 'came out'?" questioned the actress.
"Yes," said Rose. "Ended happily, you know."
"Ended!" Madame Gréville echoed. Then she laughed.
Rose flushed and smiled at herself. "Of course I don't mean that," she
admitted, "and I suppose six months isn't so very long. Still you could find
out quite a good deal ..."
"What is his affair?" The actress preferred asking another question, it
seemed, to committing herself to an answer to Rose's unspoken one. "Is he
one of your—what you call tired business men?"
"He's never tired," said Rose, "and he isn't a business man. He's a lawyer
—a rather special kind of lawyer. He has other lawyers, mostly, for his
clients, he's awfully enthusiastic about it. He says it's the finest profession
in the world, if you don't let yourself get dragged down into the stupid
routine of it. It certainly sounds thrilling when he tells about it."

The actress looked round at her. "So," she said, "you follow his work as
he follows your play? He talks seriously to you about his affairs?"
"Why, yes," said Rose, "we have wonderful talks." Then she hesitated.
"At least we used to have. There hasn't seemed to be much—time, lately. I
suppose that's it."
"One question more," said the French woman, "and not an idle one—you
will believe that? Alors! You love your husband. No need to ask that. But
how do you love him? Are you a little indulgent, a little cool, a little
contemptuous of the grossness of masculine clay, and still willing to
tolerate it as part of your bargain? Is that what you mean by love? Or do
you mean something different altogether—something vital and strong and
essential—the meeting of thought with thought, need with need, desire with
desire?"
"Yes," said Rose after a little silence, "that's what I mean."
She said it quietly, but without embarrassment and with full meaning; and
as if conscious of the adequacy of her answer, she forbore to embroider on
the theme. There was a momentary silence, while the French woman gazed
contemplatively out of the open window of the limousine, at a skyscraping
apartment building which jutted boldly into a curve of the parkway they
were flying along.
"That's a beauty, isn't it?" said Rose, following her gaze. "Every
apartment in that building has its own garage that you get to with an
elevator."
The actress nodded. "You Americans do that;" she said, "better than any
one else in the world. The—surfaces of your lives are to marvel at."
"But with nothing inside?" asked Rose. "Is that what you mean? Is—that
what you mean about—American women, that you said you'd tell me?"
Madame Gréville took her time about answering. "They are an enigma to
me," she said, "I confess it. I have never seen such women anywhere, as
these upper-class Americans. They are beautiful, clever, they know how to
dress. For the first hour, or day, or week, of an acquaintance, they have a

charm quite incomparable. And, up to a certain point, they exercise it. Your
jeunes filles are amazing. All over the world, men go mad about them. But
when they marry ..." She finished the sentence with the ghost of a shrug,
and turned to Rose. "Can you account for them? Were you wondering at
them, too, with those great eyes of yours? Alors! Are we puzzled by the
same thing? What is it, to you, they lack?"
Rose stirred a little uneasily. "I don't know very much," she said. "I don't
know them well at all, and of course I shouldn't criticize ..."
"Ah, child," broke in the actress, "there you mistake yourself. One must
always criticize. It is by the power of criticism and the courage of criticism,
that we have become different from the beasts."
"I don't know," said Rose, "except that some of them seem a little
dissatisfied and restless, as if—well, as if they wanted something they
haven't got."
"But do they truly want it?" Madame Gréville demanded. "I am willing to
be convinced, but myself, I find of your women of the aristocrat class, the
type most characteristic is"—she paused and said the thing first to herself in
French, then translated—"is a passive epicure in sensations; sensations
mostly mental, irritating or soothing—a pleasant variety. She waits to be
made to feel; she perpetually—tastes. One may demand whether it is that
their precocity has exhausted them before they are ripe, or whether your
Puritan strain survives to make all passion reprehensible, or whether simply
they have too many ideas to leave room for anything else. But, from
whatever cause, they give to a stranger like me, the impression of being
perfectly frigid, perfectly passionless. And so, as you say, of missing the
great thing altogether.
"A few of your women are great, but not as women, and of second-rate
men in petticoats, you have a vast number. But a woman, great by the
qualities of her sex, an artist in womanhood, I have not seen."
"Oh, I wish," cried Rose, "that I knew what you meant by that!"

"Why, regard now," said the actress. "In every capital of Europe—and I
know them all—wherever you find great affairs—matters of state,
diplomacy, politics—you find the influence of women in them; women of
the great world, sometimes, sometimes of the half-world; great women, at
all events, with the power to make or ruin great careers; women at whose
feet men of the first class lay all they have; women the tact of whose hands
is trusted to determine great matters. They may not be beautiful (I have seen
a faded little woman of fifty, of no family or wealth, whose salon attracted
ministers of state), they haven't the education, nor the liberties that your
women enjoy, and, in the mass, they are not regarded—how do you say?—
chivalrously. Yet there they are!
"And why? Because they are capable of great passions, great desires.
They are willing to take the art of womanhood seriously, make sacrifices for
it, as one must for any art, in order to triumph in it."
Rose thought this over rather dubiously. It was a new notion to her—or
almost new. Portia had told her once she never would have any trouble
making her husband "want" her as much as she liked. This idea of making a
serious art of your power to attract and influence men, seemed to range
itself in the same category.
"But suppose," she objected, "one doesn't want to triumph at it? Suppose
one wants to be a—person, rather than just a woman?"
"There are other careers indeed," Madame Gréville admitted, "and one
can follow them in the same spirit, make the sacrifices—pay the price they
demand. Mon dieu! How I have preached. Now you shall talk to me. It was
for that I took you captive and ran away with you."
For the next half-hour, until the car stopped in front of her house, Rose
acted on this request; told about her life before and since her marriage to
Rodney, about her friends, her amusements—anything that came into her
mind. But she lingered before getting out of the car, to say:
"I hope I haven't forgotten a single word of your—preaching. You said so
many things I want to think about."

"Don't trouble your soul with that, child," said the actress. "All the
sermon you need can be boiled down into a sentence, and until you have
found it out for yourself, you won't believe it."
"Try me," said Rose.
"Then attend.—How shall I say it?—Nothing worth having comes as a
gift, nor even can be bought—cheap. Everything of value in your life will
cost you dear; and some time or other you'll have to pay the price of it."
It was with a very thoughtful, perplexed face that Rose watched the car
drive away, and then walked slowly into her house—the ideal house that
had cost Florence McCrea and Bertie Willis so many hours and so many
hair-line decisions—and allowed herself to be relieved of her wraps by the
perfect maid, who had all but been put in the lease.
The actress had said many strange and puzzling things during their ride;
things to be accepted only cautiously, after a careful thinking out. But
strangest of all was this last observation of hers; that there was nothing of
worth in your life that you hadn't to pay a heavy price for.
Certainly it contradicted violently everything in Rose's experience, for
everything she valued had come to her precisely as a gift. Her mother's and
Portia's love of her, the life that had surrounded her in school and at the
university, the friends; and then, with her marriage, the sudden change in
her estate, the thrills, the excitement, the comparative luxuries of the new
life. Why,—even Rodney himself, about whom everything else swung in an
orbit! What price had she paid for him, or for any of the rest of it? It was all
as free as the air she breathed. It had come to her without having cost even a
wish. Was Rodney's love for her, therefore, valueless? No, the French
woman was certainly wrong about that.

CHAPTER III

WHERE DID ROSE COME IN

However, it was one thing to decide that this was so, and quite another
thing to dismiss the preposterous idea from her mind. There was still an
hour before she need begin dressing for the Randolph dinner, but as she had
already had her tea and there was nothing else to do, she thought she might
as well go about it. It might help her resist a certain perfectly irrational
depression which the talk with the actress, somewhat surprisingly, had
produced. And besides, if she were all dressed when Rodney came home,
she'd be free to visit with him while he dressed—to sit and watch him
swearing at his studs, and tell him about the events of her day, including
their climax in the ride with the famous Simone Gréville. And he'd come
over every now and then and interrupt himself and her with some sort of
unexpected caress—a kiss on the back of her neck, or an embrace that
would threaten her coiffure—and this vague, scary, nightmarish sort of
feeling, which for no reasonable reason at all seemed to be clutching at her,
would be forgotten.
It was a queer sort of feeling—a kind of misgiving, in one form or
another, as to her own identity—as if all the events since her marriage were
nothing but a dream of Rose Stanton's, from which, with vague painful
stirrings, she was just beginning to wake. Or, again, as if for all these
months, she had been playing a part in a preposterously long play, on which
the curtain was, presently, going to be rung down. She wished Rodney
would come—hoped he wouldn't be late, and finally sat down before the
telephone with a half-formed idea of calling him up and reminding him that
they were dining with the Randolphs.
Just as she laid her hand upon the receiver, the telephone bell rang. It was
Rodney calling her.
"Oh, that you, Rose?" he said. "I shan't be out till late to-night. I've got to
work."

She wanted to know what he meant by late.
"I've no idea," he said. "Ten—twelve—two. I've got to get hold of
something, but I've no idea how long it will take."
"But, Roddy, dearest," she protested. "You have to come home. You've
got the Randolphs' dinner."
"Oh, the devil!" he said. "I forgot all about it. But it doesn't make a bit of
difference, anyway. I wouldn't leave the office before I finished this job, for
anybody short of the Angel Gabriel."
"But what shall we do?" she asked despairingly.
"I don't know," said Rodney. "Call them up and tell them. Randolph will
understand."
"But,"—it was absurd that her eyes should be filling up and her throat
getting lumpy over a thing like this,—"but what shall I do? Shall I tell
Eleanor we can't come, or shall I offer to come without you?"
"Lord!" he said, "I don't care. Do whichever you like. I've got enough to
think about without deciding that. Now do hang up and run along."
"But, Rodney, what's happened? Has something gone wrong?"
"Heavens, no!" he said. "What is there to go wrong? I've got a big day in
court to-morrow and I've struck a snag, and I've got to wriggle out of it
somehow, before I quit. It's nothing for you to worry about. Go to your
dinner and have a good time. Good-by."
The click in the receiver told her he had hung up. The difficulty about the
Randolphs was managed easily enough. Eleanor was perfectly gracious
about it and insisted that Rose should come by herself.
She was completely dressed a good three-quarters of an hour before it
was time to start, and after pretending for fifteen interminable minutes to
read a magazine, she chucked it away and told her maid to order the car at
once. If she drove straight down-town, she could have a ten-minute visit

with Rodney and still not be late for the dinner. She was a little vague as to
why she wanted it so much, but the prospect was irresistible.
If any one had accused her of feeling very meritorious over not having
allowed herself to be hurt at his rudeness to her or annoyed at the way he
had demolished their evening's plans, and of hoping to make him feel a
little contrite by showing him how sweet she was about it, she might, with a
rueful grin, have acknowledged a tincture of truth about the charge; but she
didn't discover it by herself. As she dreamed out the little scene, riding
down-town in the car, she'd come stealing up behind him as he sat, bent
wearily over his book, and clasp her hands over his eyes and stroke the
wrinkles out of his forehead. He'd give a long sigh of relaxation, and pull
her down on the chair-arm and tell her what it was that troubled him, and
she'd tell him not to worry—it was surely coming out all right. And she'd
stroke his head a little longer and offer not to go to the dinner if he wanted
her to stay, and he'd say, no, he was better already, and then she'd give him a
good-by kiss and steal away, and be the life of the party at the Randolphs'
dinner, but her thoughts would never leave him....
She knew she was being silly of course, and her beautiful wide mouth
smiled an acknowledgment of the fact, even while her checks flushed and
her eyes brightened over the picture. Of course it wouldn't come out exactly
like that.
Well, it didn't!
She found a single elevator in commission in the great gloomy rotunda of
the office building, and the watchman who ran her up made a terrible noise
shutting the gate after he had let her out on the fifteenth floor. The dim
marble corridor echoed her footfalls ominously, and when she reached the
door to his outer office and tried it, she found it locked. The next door down
the corridor was the one that led directly into his private office, and here the
light shone through the ground-glass.
She stole up to it as softly as she could, tried it and found it locked, too,
so she knocked. Through the open transom above it, she heard him say

"Hell!" in a heartfelt sort of way, and heard his chair thrust back. The next
moment he opened the door with a jerk.
His glare of annoyance changed to bewilderment at the sight of her, and
he said:
"Rose! Has anything happened? What's the matter?" And catching her by
the arm, he led her into the office. "Here, sit down and get your breath and
tell me about it!"
She smiled and took his face in both her hands. "But it's the other way,"
she said. "There's nothing the matter with me. I came down, you poor old
boy, to see what was the matter with you."
He frowned and took her hands away and stepped back out of her reach.
Had it not been for the sheer incredibility of it, she'd have thought that her
touch was actually distasteful to him.
"Oh," he said. "I thought I told you over the phone there was nothing the
matter!—Won't you be awfully late to the Randolphs'?"
"I had ten minutes," she said, "and I thought ..."
She broke off the sentence when she saw him snap out his watch and look
at it.
"I know there's something," she said. "I can tell just by the way your eyes
look and the way you're so tight and—strained. If you'd just tell me about it,
and then sit down and let me—try to take the strain away...."
Beyond a doubt the strain was there. The laugh he meant for a good-
humored dismissal of her fears, didn't sound at all as it was intended to.
"Can't you tell me?" she repeated.
"Good heavens!" he said. "There's nothing to tell! I've got an argument
before the Court of Appeals to-morrow and there's a ruling decision against
me. It is against me, and it's bad law. But that isn't what I want to tell them.
I want some way of making a distinction so that I can hold that the decision
doesn't rule."

"And it wouldn't help," she ventured, "if you told me all about it? I don't
care about the dinner."
"I couldn't explain in a month," he said.
"Oh, I wish I were some good," she said forlornly.
He pulled out his watch again and began pacing up and down the room.
"I just can't stand it to see you like that," she broke out again. "If you'll
only sit down for five minutes and let me try to get that strained look out of
your eyes...."
"Good God, Rose!" he shouted. "Can't you take my word for it and let it
alone? I'm not ill, nor frightened, nor broken-hearted. I don't need to be
comforted nor encouraged. I'm in an intellectual quandary. For the next
three hours, or six, or however long it takes, I want my mind to run cold and
smooth. I've got to be tight and strained. That's the way the job's done. You
can't solve an intellectual problem by having your hand held, or your eyes
kissed, or anything like that. Now, for God's sake, child, run along and let
me forget you ever existed, for a while!"
And he ground his teeth over an impulse that all but got the better of him,
after she'd shut the door, to follow her out into the corridor and pull her up
in his arms and kiss her face all over, and to consign the Law and the
Prophets both, to the devil.

CHAPTER IV

LONG CIRCUITS AND SHORT

James Randolph was a native Chicagoan, but his father, an intelligent and
prosperous physician, with a general practise in one of the northern suburbs,
afterward annexed to the city, did not belong to the old before-the-fire
aristocracy that Rodney and Frederica, and Martin Whitney, the Crawfords
and Violet Williamson were born into. The medical tradition carried itself
along to the third generation, when James made a profession of it, and in
him, it flowered really into genius. From the beginning his bent toward the
psychological aspect of it was marked and his father was sympathetic
enough to give it free sway. After graduating from one of the Chicago
medical colleges he went to Johns Hopkins, and after that to Vienna, where
he worked mostly under Professor Freud.
It was in Vienna that he met Eleanor Blair. She, too, was a native of
Illinois, but this fact cut a very different figure in her life from that which it
cut in his. Her grandfather, a pioneer, forceful, thrifty and probably rather
unscrupulous, had settled on the wonderfully fertile land at a time when one
had almost to drive the Indians off it. He had accumulated it steadily to the
day of his death and died in possession of about thirty thousand acres of it.
It was in much this fashion that a feudal adventurer became the founder of a
line of landed nobility, but the centrifugal force of American life caused the
thing to work out differently. His son had an eastern college education, got
elected to Congress, as a preliminary step in a political career, went to
Washington, fell in love with and married the beautiful daughter of an
unreconstructed and impoverished southern gentleman. She detested the
North, and as her love for the South found its expression in passionate
laments over its ruin, uncomplicated by any desire to live there, she spent
more and more of her time—her husband's faint wishes becoming less and
less operative with her until they ceased altogether—in one after another of
the European capitals.
So Eleanor, two generations away from the fertile soil of central Illinois,
was as exotic to it as an orchid would be in a New England garden. Two or
three brief perfunctory visits to the land her income came from, and to the
relatives who still lived upon it, became the substitute for what, in an older
and stabler civilization, would have been the dominant tradition in her life.

She must have been a source of profound satisfaction to large numbers of
French, Italian, Austrian and English persons, to whose eminent social
circles her mother's wealth and breeding gained admittance, by embodying
for them, with perfect authenticity, their notion of the American girl. She
was rich, beautiful, clever in a rather shallow, "American" way, she had a
will of her own, and was indulged by her mother with an astounding
amount of liberty; she was audacious, yet with a tempering admixture of
cool shrewdness, which kept her out of the difficulties she was always on
the brink of.
Kept her out of them, that is, until, in Vienna, as I have said, she met
James Randolph. That she fell in love with him is one of those facts which
seem astonishing the first time you look at them, and inevitable when you
look again. Physically, a sanguine blond, with a narrow head, a forward
thrusting nose, and really blue eyes, his dominating spiritual quality was the
sort of asceticism which proclaims not weak anemic desires, but strong
unruly ones, curbed in by the hand of a still stronger will. He was highly
imaginative, as a successful follower of the Freudian method must be. He
was capable of the gentlest sympathy, and of the most relentless insistence.
And he thought, until he met Eleanor Blair, that he was, indisputably, his
own master.
The wide social gulf between them—between a beautiful American
heiress with the entry into all circles of aristocratic society, except the
highest, and an only decently pecunious medical student, caught both of
them off their guard. The utter unlikelihood of anything coming of such an
acquaintance as theirs, was just the ambush needed to make it possible for
them to fall in love. They would, probably, have attracted each other
anywhere. But, in a city like Vienna, where all the sensuous appurtenances
of life are raised to their highest power, the attraction became irresistible.
He did resist as long as he could—successfully, indeed, to the point of
holding himself back from asking her to marry him, or even explicitly from
making love to her. But the thing shone through his deeply-colored
emotions, like light through a stained-glass window. And when she asked
him to marry her, as she did in so many words—pleaded her homesickness
for a home she had never known, and a loneliness she had suddenly become

aware of, amid would-be friends and lovers, who could not, not one of
them, be called disinterested, his resistance melted like a powder of April
snow.
It was the only serious obstacle she had to overcome. The terms of her
father's will left her share of the income of the estate wholly at her disposal.
And so, in spite of her mother's horrified protest, they were married, and not
long afterward, her mother, who was still a year or two on the sunny side of
fifty, gratified her aristocratic yearnings by marrying a count herself.
The Randolphs came back to America and, somewhat against Eleanor's
wishes, settled in Chicago. With her really very large income, her exotic
type of beauty and her social skill, she was probably right in thinking she
could have made a success anywhere. One of the larger eastern cities—
preferably New York or Washington, would have suited her better. But
Chicago, he said, was where he belonged and where his best chance for
professional success lay, and she yielded, though without waiving her
privilege of making a more or less good-humored grievance of it. However,
she found the place much more tolerable than riding into and out of it on the
train a few times had led her to expect.
She knew a few people of exactly the right sort and she neatly and almost
painlessly detached her husband from his old Lake View associations. She
looked out a house in precisely the right neighborhood, and furnished it to
combine the splendor of her income with the simple austerity of his
profession in just the right proportions. She trailed her game with unfailing
precision, never barked up the wrong tree, could distinguish a goat from a
sheep as far as she could see one, and in no time at all had won the exact
position she wanted.
Her attitude toward her husband (you have already had a sample of it at
Frederica's famous dinner, where Rodney was supposed to take the
preliminary steps toward marrying Hermione Woodruff) attracted general
admiration, and it was fortified, of course, by the story of their romantic
marriage. It was conceded she had done a very fine and splendid thing in
marrying the man she loved, settling down to live with him on so
comparatively simple and modest a scale, and devoting herself so whole-

heartedly to his career. She had an air—and it wasn't consciously assumed,
either—of living wholly with reference to him, which people found
exceedingly engaging. (A cynic might observe at this point that the same
quality in a homely unattractive woman would fail of producing this effect.)
Indeed, he had much to be grateful for. But for the fact that his wife was
accepted without reserve, a man whose principal preoccupation was with
matters of sex psychology, who was said to cure hysterical and neurasthenic
patients by the interpretation of their dreams, would have been regarded
askance by the average run of common-sense, golf-playing men of affairs.
Even his most miraculous cures would be attributed to the imaginary nature
of the disease, rather than to the skill of the physician.
Not even his wife's undeniable charm could altogether efface this
impression from the mind of this sort of man. But though his way of turning
the theme of a smoking-room story into a subject for serious scientific
discussion might make you uncomfortable, you couldn't meet James
Randolph and hear him talk, without respecting him. He was attractive to
women (it amounted almost to fascination with the neurotic type), and to
men of high intelligence, like Rodney, he was a boon and a delight. And the
people who liked him least were precisely those most attracted by his wife.
Anyhow, no one refused an invitation to their dinners.
Rose's arrival at this one—a little late, to be sure, but not scandalously—
created a mild sensation. None of the other guests were strangers, either, on
whom she could have the effect of novelty. They were the same crowd,
pretty much, who had been encountering one another all winter—dancing,
dining and talking themselves into a state of complete satiety with one
another. They'd split up pretty soon and branch out in different directions—
the Florida east coast, California, Virginia Hot Springs and so on, and so
galvanize their interest in life and in one another. At present they were
approaching the lowest ebb.
But when Rose came into the drawing-room—in a wonderful gown that
dared much, and won the reward of daring—a gown she'd meant to hold in
reserve for a greater occasion, but had put on to-night because she had felt
somehow like especially pleasing Rodney—when she came in, she

reoxygenated the social atmosphere. She won a moment of complete
silence, and when the buzz of talk arose again, it was jerky—the product of
divided minds and unstable attentions.
She was, in fact, a stranger. Her voice had a bead on it which roused a
perfectly unreasoning physical excitement—the kind of bead which, in
singing, makes all the difference between a church choir and grand opera.
The glow they were accustomed to in her eyes, concentrated itself into
flashes, and the flush that so often, and so adorably, suffused her face, burnt
brighter now in her cheeks and left the rest pale.
And these were true indices of the change that had taken place within her.
From sheer numb incredulity, which was all she had felt as she'd walked
away from Rodney's office door, and from the pain of an intolerable hurt,
she had reacted to a fine glow of indignation. She had found herself
suddenly feeling lighter, older, indescribably more confident. That dinner
was to be gone through with, was it? Well, it should be! They shouldn't
suspect her humiliation or her hurt. She was conscious suddenly of
enormous reserves of power hitherto unsuspected—a power that could be
exercised to any extent she chose, according to her will.
Her husband, James Randolph reflected, had evidently either been
making love to her, or indulging in the civilized equivalent of beating her;
he was curious to find out which. And having learned from his wife that
Rose was to sit beside him at the table, he made up his mind that he would
make her tell him.
He didn't attempt it, though, during his first talk with her—confined
himself rigorously to the carefully sifted chaff which does duty for polite
conversation over the same hors-d'oeuvres and entrées, from one dinner to
the next, the season round. It wasn't until Eleanor had turned the table the
second time, that he made his first gambit in the game.
"No need asking you if you like this sort of thing," he said. "I would like
to know how you keep it up. You have the same things said to you seven
nights a week and you make the same answers—thrust and parry, carte and

tierce, buttons on the foils. It can't any of it get anywhere. What's the
attraction?"
"You can't get a rise out of me to-night," said Rose. "Not after what I've
been through to-day. Madame Gréville's been talking to me. She thinks
American women are dreadful dubs,—or she would if she knew the word—
thinks we don't know our own game. Do you agree with her?"
"I'll tell you that," he said, "after you answer my question. What's the
attraction?"
"Don't you think it would be a mistake," said Rose, "for me to try to
analyze it? Suppose I did and found there wasn't any! You aren't supposed
to look a gift horse in the mouth, you know."
"Is that what's the matter with Rodney?" he asked. "Is this sort of"—a
gesture with his head took in the table—"caramel diet, beginning to go
against his teeth?"
"He had to work to-night," Rose said. "He was awfully sorry he couldn't
come."
She smiled just a little ironically as she said it, and exaggerated by a
hair's breadth, perhaps, the purely conventional nature of the reply.
"Yes," he observed, "that's what we say. Sometimes it gets us off and
sometimes it doesn't."
"Well, it got him off to-night," she said. "He was pretty impressive. He
said there was a ruling decision against him and he had to make some sort
of distinction so that the decision wouldn't rule. Do you know what that
means? I don't."
"Why didn't you ask him?" Randolph wanted to know.
"I did and he said he could explain it, but that it would take a month. So
of course there wasn't time."
"I thought," said Randolph, "that he used to talk law to you by the hour."

The button wasn't on the foil that time, because the thrust brought blood
—a bright flush into her cheeks and a sudden brightness into her eyes that
would have induced him to relent if she hadn't followed the thing up of her
own accord.
"I wish you'd tell me something," she said. "I expect you know better
than any one else I could ask. Why is it that husbands and wives can't talk
to each other? With people who live the way we do, it isn't that they've
worn each other out, because they see no more of each other, hardly, than
they do of the others. And it isn't that they're naturally more uninteresting to
each other than the rest of the people they know. Because then, why did
they marry each other in the first place, instead of any one of the others who
are so easy to talk to afterward? Imagine what this table would be if the
husbands and wives sat side by side! Would Eleanor ever be able to turn it
so that they talked that way?"
"That's a fascinating speculation," he said. "I wish I could persuade her
some time to indulge the wild eccentricity of trying it out."
"Well, why?" she demanded.
"Shall I try to say something witty," he asked, "or do you want it, as near
as may be, absolutely straight?"
"Let's indulge," she said, "in the wild, eccentricity of talking straight."
The cigarettes came around just then, and he lighted one rather
deliberately, at one of the candles, before he answered.
"I am under the impression," he said, "that husbands and wives can talk
exactly as well as any other two people. Exactly as well, and no better. The
necessary conditions for real conversation are a real interest in and
knowledge of a common subject; ability on the part of both to contribute
something to that subject. Well, if a husband and wife can meet those terms,
they can talk. But the joker is, as our legislative friend over there would
say," (he nodded down the table toward a young millionaire of altruistic
principles, who had got elected to the state assembly) "the joker is that a

man and a woman who aren't married, and who are moderately attracted to
each other, can talk, or seem to talk, without meeting those conditions."
"Seem to talk?" she questioned.
"Seem to exchange ideas mutually. They think they do, but they don't. It's
pure illusion, that's the answer."
"I'm not clever, really," said Rose, "and I don't know much, and I simply
don't understand. Will you explain it, in short words,"—she smiled—"since
we're not married, you know?"
He grinned back at her. "All right," he said, "since we're not married, I
will. We'll take a case ..." He looked around the table. "We'll be discreet," he
amended, "and take a hypothetical case. We'll take Darby and Joan. They
encounter each other somewhere, and something about them that men have
written volumes about and never explained yet, sets up—you might almost
call it a chemical reaction between them—a physical reaction, certainly.
They arrest each other's attention—get to thinking about each other, are
strongly drawn together.
"It's a sex attraction—not quite the oldest and most primitive thing in the
world, but nearly. Only, Darby and Joan aren't primitive people. If they
were, the attraction would satisfy itself in a direct primitive way. But each
of them is carrying a perfectly enormous superstructure of ideas and
inhibitions, emotional refinements and capacities, and the sex attraction is
so disguised that they don't recognize it. Do you know what a short circuit
is in electricity?"
"I think so," said Rose, "but you'd better not take a chance. Tell me that,
too."
"Why," he said, "the juice that comes into your house to light it and heat
the flat-irons and the toaster, and so on, comes in by one wire and goes out
by another. Before it can get out, it's got to do all the work you want it to do
—push its way through the resistance of fine tungsten filaments in your
lamps and the iron wires in your heaters that get white hot resisting it.
When it's pushed its way through all of them and done the work you want it

to do, it's tired out and goes away by the other wire. But if you cut off the
insulation down in the basement, where those two wires are close together,
and make it possible for the current to jump straight across without doing
any work, it will take the short circuit instead of the long one and you won't
have any lights in your house. Now do you see what I mean?
"Darby and Joan are civilized. That is to say, they're insulated. The
current's there, but it's long-circuited. The only expression it's got is through
the intelligence,—so it lights the house. Absence of common knowledge
and common interests only adds to the resistance and makes it burn all the
brighter. Naturally Darby and Joan fall victims to the very dangerous
illusion that they're intellectual companions. They think they're having
wonderful talks. All they are doing, is long-circuiting their sex attraction.
Well, marriage gives it a short circuit. Why should the current light the
lamps when it can strike straight across? There you are!"
"And poor Joan," said Rose, after a palpable silence, but evenly enough,
"who has thought all along that she was attracting a man by her intelligence
and her understanding, and all that, wakes up to find that she's been married
for her long eyelashes, and her nice voice—and her pretty ankles. That's a
little hard on her, don't you think, if she's been taking herself seriously?"
"Nine times in ten," he said, "she's fooling herself. She's taken her own
ankles much more seriously than she has her mind. She's capable of real
sacrifices for them—for her sex charm, that is. She'll undergo a real
discipline for it. Intelligence she regards as a gift. She thinks the witty
conversation she's capable of after dinner, on a cocktail and two glasses of
champagne, or the bright letters she can write to a friend, are real exercises
of her mind—real work. But work isn't done like that. Work's overcoming
something that resists; and there's strain in it, and pain and
discouragement."
In her cheeks the red flared up brighter. She smiled again—not her own
smile—one at any rate that was new to her.
"You don't 'solve an intellectual problem' then;" she quoted, "'by having
your hand held, or your eyes kissed?'"

Whereupon he shot a look at her and observed that evidently he wasn't as
much of a pioneer as he thought.
She did not rise to this cast, however. "All right;" she said, "admitting that
her ankles are serious and her mind isn't, what is Joan going to do about it?"
"It's easier to say what she's not to do," he decided, after hesitating a
moment. "Her fatal mistake will be to despise her ankles without
disciplining her mind. If she will take either one of them seriously, or both
for that matter—it's possible—she'll do very well."
He could, no doubt, have continued on the theme indefinitely, but the
table turned the other way just then and Rose took up an alleged
conversation with the man at her right which lasted until they left the table
and included such topics as indoor golf, woman's suffrage, the new dances,
Bernard Shaw, Campanini and the Progressive party; with a perfectly
appropriate and final comment on each.
Rose didn't care. She was having a wonderful time—a new kind of
wonderful time. No longer gazing, big-eyed like little Cinderella at a
pageant some fairy godmother's whim had admitted her to, but consciously
gazed upon; she was the show to-night, and she knew it. Her low, finely
modulated voice so rich in humor, so varied in color, had to-night an edge
on it that carried it beyond those she was immediately speaking to and drew
looks that found it hard to get away again. For the first time in her life, with
full self-consciousness, she was producing effects, thrilling with the
exercise of a power as obedient to her will as electricity to the manipulator
of a switchboard.
She was like a person driving an aeroplane, able to move in all three
dimensions. Pretty soon, of course, she'd have to come hack to earth, where
certain monstrously terrifying questions were waiting for her.
Madame Gréville's final apothegm had suggested one of them. Was all
she valued in the world just so much fairy gold that would change over
night into dry leaves in her treasure chest because she had never earned it—
paid the price for it that life relentlessly exacts for all we may be allowed to
call ours?

Her tragi-comic scene with Rodney suggested another. What was her
value to him? Was she something enormously desirable when he wanted his
hand held and his eyes kissed, but an infernal nuisance when serious
matters were concerned? A fine and luxurious dissipation, not dangerous
unless recklessly indulged in, but to be kept strictly in her place? Before her
talk with Randolph she'd have laughed at that.
But did the horrible plausibility of what he had said actually cover the
truth? Did she owe that first golden hour with Rodney, his passionate
thrilling avowal of his life's philosophy, to nothing deeper in herself than
her unconscious power of rousing in him an equally unconscious, primitive
sex desire? Was the fine mutuality of understanding she had so proudly
boasted to her mother clear illusion? Now that the short circuit had been
established, would the lights never burn in the upper stories of their house
again? Turned about conversely the question read like this: Was the thing
that had, in Randolph himself, aroused his vivid interest in the subject—
well, nothing more than the daring cut of her gown, the gleam of her jewels,
the whiteness of her skin ...?
Those questions were waiting for her to come back to earth; and they
wouldn't get tired and go away. But for the present the knowledge that they
were there only made the aeroplane ride the more exhilarating.
She was called to the telephone just as she was on the point of starting
reluctantly for home, and found Rodney on the wire. He told her that he had
got hold of the thing he was looking for, but that there were still hours of
work ahead of him while he was fortifying himself with necessary
authorities. He wouldn't come home to-night at all, he said. When his work
was finished, he'd go to the club and have a Turkish bath and all the sleep
he had time for. When he got through in court to-morrow afternoon, he'd
come home.
It was all perfectly reasonable—it was to her finely tuned ear just a shade
too reasonable. It had been thought out as an excuse. Because it wasn't for
the Turkish bath nor the extra hour's sleep that he was staying away from
home. It was herself he was staying away from. He wanted his mind to stay
cold and taut, and he was afraid to face the temptation of her eyes and her

soft white arms. And in the mood of that hour, it pleased her that this should
be so—that the ascetic in him should pay her the tribute of fear.
Afterward, of course, she felt like lashing herself for having felt like that
and for having replied, in a spirit of pure coquetry, in a voice of studied,
cool, indifferent good humor:
"That's a good idea, Roddy. I'm glad you're not coming back. Good
night."

CHAPTER V

RODNEY SMILED

It was with a reminiscent smile that Rose sat down before her telephone
the next morning and called a number from memory. Less than a year ago,
it had been such a thrilling adventure to call the number of that fraternity
house down at the university and ask, in what she conceived to be a
businesslike way, for Mr. Haines. And then, presently, to hear the voice of
the greatest half-back the varsity had boasted of in years, saying in answer
to her "Hello, Harry," "Hello, Rose."
It was really less than a year, and yet it was so immensely long ago,
judged by anything but the calendar, that the natural way to think of him
was as a married man with a family somewhere and faint memories of the
days when he was a student and used to flirt with a girl called Rose
something—Rose Stanton, that was it!
It was during one of the interminable waking hours of last night that she
had thought of the half-back as a person who might be able, and willing, to

do her the service she wanted, and she had spent a long while wondering
how she could get track of him. Then the logic of the calendar had forced
the conviction on her, that he was, in all probability still at the university,
dozing through recitations, or lounging about the corridors, in a blue serge
suit and a sweater with a C on it, waiting for some other girl to come out of
her class-room; and that between the hours of ten-fifteen and eleven, it was
altogether likely that she'd find him again, as she had so many times in the
past, at his fraternity house, going through the motions of getting up an
eleven o'clock recitation. It was absurd enough now to find herself calling
the old number and asking again for Mr. Haines. The dreamlike unreality of
it grew stronger, when the voice that answered said, "Just a minute," and
then bellowed out his old nickname—"Hello, Tiny! Phone!" and, after a
wait, she heard his own very deep bass.
"Hello. What is it?"
"Hello, Harry," she said. "This is Rose Aldrich. Do you remember me?—
Rose Stanton, you know."
The ensuing silence was so long, that she said "Hello" again to make sure
that he was still there.
"Y—yes," he said. "Of—of course I haven't forgotten. I—I only ... I ..."
She wondered what he was so embarrassed about, but to save the
situation, she interrupted.
"Are you going to be awfully busy this afternoon? Because, if you aren't,
there's something you can do for me. You're in the law school this year,
aren't you?"
"Yes," he said. "Of course I'm not busy at all."
"It'll take quite a little while," she warned him, "an hour or so, and I don't
want to interfere with anything you've got to do."
Again he assured her that he hadn't anything.

"Well, then," she said rather dubiously, because his voice sounded still so
constrained and unnatural, "I'll come down in the car and pick you up about
half past one. Is that all right?"
"Yes," he said. "Yes, of course. Thank you very much."
Had inclination led Rose to do a little imaginative thinking about the half-
back, from his own point of view, she might, without much trouble, have
approximated the cause of his embarrassment.
Here is a poor but honest young man, who has devoted himself, heart,
brain and good right arm, to the service of a beautiful young fellow student
at the university. They must wait for each other, of course, until he can
graduate and get admitted to the bar and make a success that will enable
him to support her as she deserves to be supported. The girl declines to
wait. A much older man—a great, trampling brute of a man, possessed of
wealth and fame, and a social altitude positively vertiginous—asks her to
marry him. She, woman-weak, yields to the temptation of all the gauds and
baubles that go with his name, and marries him. Indeed, few young men at
the university ever have as valid an excuse for becoming broken-hearted
misogynists as the half-back. He would he faithful, of course, though she
was not. And some day, years later, it might he, she would come hack
broken-hearted to him, confess the fatal mistake that she had made; seek his
protection, perhaps, against the cruelties of the monster she had come to
hate. He would forgive her, console her—in a perfectly moral way, of
course—and for a while, they would just be friends. Then the wicked
husband would conveniently die, and after long years, they could find
happiness.
It made a very pretty idea to entertain during the semi-somnolent hours of
dull lectures and while he was waiting for the last possible moment to leap
out of bed in the morning and make a dash for his first recitation. Written
down on paper, the imaginary conversation between them would have filled
volumes.
But to be called actually to the telephone—she had telephoned to him a
thousand times in the dream—and hear her say, just as in the dream she had

said—"This is Rose; do you remember me?" was enough to make even his
herculean knees knock together. To be sure her voice wasn't choked with
sobs, but you never could tell over the telephone.
What did she want to do? Confront her husband with him, perhaps, this
very afternoon, and say, "Here is the man I love?" And what would he do
then? He'd have to back her up, of course—and until his next mouth's
allowance came in, he had only a dollar and eighty-five cents in the world!
Rose couldn't have filled in all the details, of course, but she might have
approximated the final result. Indeed, I think she had done so,
unconsciously, by half past one, when her car stopped in front of the
fraternity house and, instantaneously, like a cuckoo out of a clock, the half-
back appeared. He was portentously solemn, and Rose thought he looked a
little pale.
"Get in," she said holding out a hand to him. "I'm going to take you
down-town to do an errand for me—well, two errands, really. My, but it's a
long time since I've seen you!"
She didn't look tragic, to be sure—not as if there were livid bruises
underneath her furs. And nothing about the manner of her greeting
suggested that she was on the point of sobbing out a plea to be forgiven.
Still, what did she mean by an errand? It might be anything.
"You see," she explained, "I happened to remember that you were going
to begin studying law this year, and that you were just the person who
wouldn't mind doing what I want."
"Divorce!" thought the half-back with a shudder.
"I want you," she went on, "to tell me just how you begin studying law—
what text-books you get, and where you get them. I want you to come along
and pick them out for me. You see, I've decided to study it myself."
It was a fact that the half-back was enormously relieved. But it was a
brutal derisive fact—an unescapable one. He wasn't heart-broken over the
dashing of a suddenly raised hope. He was, in his heart of hearts, saying,
"Thank the Lord!"

If he had been pale before, he was red enough now. He felt ridiculous and
irritable.
"Your husband knows all that a great deal better than I, of course," he
said.
"Yes, of course," Rose was thoughtless enough to admit, "but you see, I
don't want him to know." She flushed a little herself. "It's going to be a—
surprise for him," she said.
"And, after we've got the books," she went on, "I want you to do
something else. He's making an argument in court to-day, and I want to go
and hear him. Only—I'm so ignorant, you see, I don't know how to do it and
I didn't want to tell him I was going. So you're to find out where the court
room is and how to get me in. Now, tell me all about everything and what's
been happening since I went away. I saw you made the all-American last
fall, and meant to write you a note about it, but I didn't get a chance. That
was great!"
But even at this new angle, the talk didn't run smoothly. Because,
precisely as the half-back forgot his terrors and the hopes that had prompted
them, and the absurdity of both—precisely as he began to feel, after all, that
it was a very superb and grown-up thing to be a familiar friend of a married
woman with a limousine and a respectful chauffeur, and wonderful clothes
and an air of taking them all for granted—precisely as he made up his mind
to this, he became so very mature, and wise and blasé, modeled his manners
and his conversation so strictly on John Drew in his attempt to rise to the
situation, that the schoolboy topics she suggested froze on his tongue. So
that, by the time he had picked out the books for her and seen them stowed
away in the car, and then had telephoned Rodney's office to find what court
he was appearing before, and finally taken her up to the eighth floor in the
Federal Building and left her there, she was, though grateful, distinctly glad
to be rid of him.
What heightened this feeling was that just as she caught herself smiling a
little, down inside, over his callow absurdity, she reflected that a year ago
they had been equals; that, as far as actual intelligence went, he was no

doubt her equal to-day—her superior, perhaps. He'd gone on studying and
she hadn't. Except for the long-circuited sex attraction that Doctor Randolph
had been talking about last night, he was as capable of being an intellectual
companion to her husband as she was. That idea stung the red of resolution
into her cheeks. She would study law. She'd study it with all her might!
She was successful in her project of slipping into the rear of the court
room without attracting her husband's attention, and for two hours and a
half, she listened with mingled feelings, to his argument. A good part of the
time she was occupied in fighting off, fiercely, an almost overwhelming
drowsiness. The court room was hot of course, the glare from the skylight
pressed down her eyelids; she hadn't slept much the night before. And then,
there was no use pretending that she could follow her husband's reasoning.
Listening to it had something the same effect on her as watching some
enormous, complicated, smooth-running mass of machinery. She was
conscious of the power of it, though ignorant of what made it go, and of
what it was accomplishing.
The three stolid figures behind the high mahogany bench seemed to be
following it attentively, though they irritated her bitterly, sometimes, by
indulging in whispered conversations. Toward the end, though, as Rodney
opened the last phase of his argument, one of them, the youngest—a man
with a thick neck and a square head—hunched forward and interrupted him
with a question; evidently a penetrating one, for the man sitting across the
table from Rodney looked up and grinned, and interjected a remark of his
own.
"I simply followed the cases cited in Aldrich on Quasi Contracts," he
said. "I have a copy of the work here, in case Mr. Aldrich didn't bring one
along himself, which I'd be glad to submit to the Court."
Rose gasped. It was his own book they were quoting against him.
"I propose to show," said Rodney, "if the Court please, that an absolutely
vital distinction is to be made between the cases cited in the section of
Aldrich on Quasi Contracts, which my honorable opponent refers to, and
the case before the Court."

Then the other judges spoke up. They knew the cases, it appeared, and
didn't want to look at the book, but it was clear that they were skeptical
about the distinction. For five minutes the formal argument was lost in swift
flashing phrases in which everybody took a part. Rodney was defending
himself against them all. And Rose, in an agony because she couldn't
understand it, was reminded, grotesquely enough, of the Gentleman of
France, or some other of the sword-and-cloak heroes of her girlhood,
defending the head of the stairway against the simultaneous assault of half a
dozen enemies. And then suddenly it was over. The judges settled back
again, the argument went on.
At half past four, the oldest judge, who sat in the middle, interrupted
again to tell Rodney, with what seemed to Rose brutally bad manners, what
time it was.
"If you can finish your argument in fifteen minutes, Mr. Aldrich, we'll
hear you out. If it's going to take longer than that, the Court will adjourn till
to-morrow morning."
"I don't think I shall want more than fifteen minutes," said Rodney, and
he went on again.
And, presently, he just stopped talking and began stacking up his notes.
The oldest judge mumbled something, everybody stood up and the three
stiff formidable figures filed out by a side door. It was all over.
But nothing had happened!
Rose had been looking forward, you see, to a driving finish; to a dramatic
summoning of reserves, a mighty onslaught. And at the end of it, as from
the umpire at a ball game, to a decision. She had expected to leave the court
room in the blissful knowledge of Rodney's victory or the tragic acceptance
of his defeat. In her surprise over the failure of this climax to materialize,
she almost neglected to make her escape before he discovered her there.
One practical advantage she had gained out of what was, on the whole, a
rather unsatisfactory afternoon. When she had gone home and changed into
the sort of frock she thought he'd like and come down-stairs in it in answer

to his shouted greeting from the lower hall, she didn't say, as otherwise she
would have done, "How did it come out, Roddy? Did you win?"
In the light of her newly-acquired knowledge, she could see how a
question of that sort would irritate him. Instead of that, she said: "You dear
old boy, how dog tired you must be! How do you think it went? Do you
think you impressed them? I bet you did."
And not having been rubbed the wrong way by a foolish question, he held
her off with both hands for a moment, then hugged her up and told her she
was a trump.
"I had a sort of uneasy feeling," he confessed, "that after last night—the
way I threw you out of my office, fairly, I'd find you—tragic. I might have
known I could count on you. Lord, but it's good to have you like this! Is
there anywhere we have got to go? Or can we just stay home?"
He didn't want to flounder through an emotional morass, you see. A firm
smooth-bearing surface, that was what, for every-day use, he wanted her to
provide him with; lightly given, casual caresses that could be accepted with
a smile, pleasantness, a confident security that she wouldn't be "tragic." And
on the assumption that she couldn't walk beside him on the main path of his
life, it was just and sensible. But it wasn't good enough for Rose.
So the very next morning, she stripped the cover off the first of the books
the half-back had picked out for her, and really went to work. She bit down,
angrily, the yawns that blinded her eyes with tears; she made desperate
efforts to flog her mind into grappling with the endless succession of
meaningless pages spread out before her, to find a germ of meaning
somewhere in it that would bring the dead verbiage to life. She tried to
recall the thrill in Rodney's voice when he had told her, on that wonderful
wind-swept afternoon, that the law was the finest profession in the world.
Also, he had told her, he'd never been bored with it—it was immoral to be
bored. It was a confession of defeat, anyway, she could see that. And she
wouldn't—she absolutely would not be defeated.
In a variety of moods which included everything except real hope and
confidence, she kept the thing up for weeks—didn't give up indeed, until

Fate stepped in, in her ironic way, and took the decision out of her hands.
She was very secretive about it; developed an almost morbid fear that
Rodney would discover what she was doing and laugh his big laugh at her.
She resisted innumerable questions she wanted to propound to him, from a
fear that they'd betray her secret.
She even forbore to ask him about the case—it was The Case in her mind
—the one she knew about, and as she struggled along with her heavy text-
books, and a realization grew in her mind of the countless hours of such
struggling on his part which must have lain behind his ability to make that
argument that day, the thing accumulated importance to her. How could he,
under the suspense of waiting for that decision, concentrate his mind on
anything else?
She discovered in the newspaper one day, a column summary of court
decisions that had been handed down, and though The Case wasn't in it, she
kept, from that day forward, a careful watch—discovered where the legal
news was printed, and never overlooked a paragraph. And at last she found
it—just the bare statement "Judgment affirmed." Rodney, she knew, had
represented the appellant. He was beaten.
For a moment the thing bruised her like a blow. She had never succeeded
in entertaining, seriously, the possibility that it could end otherwise than in
victory for him. She read it again and made sure. She remembered the
names of both parties to the suit, and she knew which side Rodney was on.
There couldn't be any mistake about it. And the certainty weighed down her
spirits with a leaden depression.
And then, all at once, in the indrawing of a single breath, she saw it
differently. Now that it had happened—and she couldn't help its happening
—didn't it give her, after all, the very opportunity she wanted? She
remembered what he had said the night he had turned her out of his office.
He wasn't sick or discouraged. He was in an intellectual quandary that
couldn't be solved by having his hand held or his eyes kissed.
She saw now, that that had been just enough. She couldn't help him out of
his intellectual quandaries—yet. But under the discouragement and

lassitude of defeat, couldn't she help him? She remembered how many
times she had gone to him for help like that. In panicky moments when the
new world she had been transplanted into seemed terrible to her; in
moments when she feared she had made hideous mistakes; and, most
notably, during the three or four days of an acute illness of her mother's,
when she had been brought face to face with the monstrous, incredible
possibility of losing her, how she had clung to him, how his tenderness had
soothed and quieted her—how his strength and steady confidence had run
through her veins like wine!
He had never come to her like that. She knew now it was a thing she had
unconsciously longed for. And to-night she'd have a chance! Oddly enough,
it turned out to be the happiest day she'd known in a long while. There was
a mounting excitement in her, as the hours passed—a thrilling suspense.
Perhaps, after all, it wasn't going to be necessary to grind through all those
law-books in order to win the place beside him that she wanted. If she could
comfort him—mother him in his defeat and discouragement—hold him fast
when his world reeled around him, that would be the basis of a better
companionship than mere ability to chop legal logic with him. She could he
content with the shallow sparkle of the stream of their life together, if it
deepened, now and then, into still pools like this.
She resisted the impulse to call him up on the telephone, and a stronger
one to go straight to him at his office. She'd wait until he came home to her.
She had been feeling wretched lately—headachy, nervous, sickish;—
probably, she thought, from staying in the house too much and bending over
her heavy law-books. Perhaps she had strained her eyes. But to-day these
discomforts were forgotten. Every little while she straightened up and stood
at an open window drawing in long breaths. He should see her at her best
to-night—serene—triumphant. The pallor of her cheeks he had commented
on lately, shouldn't be there to trouble him.
For two hours that afternoon, she listened for his latch-key, and when at
last she heard it she stole down the stairs. He didn't shout her name from the
hall, as he often did. He didn't hear her coming, and she got a look at his
face as he stood at the table absently turning over some mail that lay there.
He looked tired, she thought.

He saw her when she reached the lower landing, but for just a fraction of
a second his gaze left her and went back to the letter he held in his hand, as
if to satisfy himself it was of no importance before he tossed it away. Then
he came to meet her.
"Oh!" he said. "I thought you were going to be off somewhere with
Frederica this afternoon. It's been a great day. I hope you haven't spent the
whole of it indoors. You're looking great, anyway. Come here and give me a
kiss."
Because she had hesitated, a little perplexed. Did he mean not to tell her
—to "spare" her, as he'd have said? The kiss she gave had a different quality
from those that ordinarily constituted her greetings, and the arms that went
round his neck, didn't give him their customary hug. But they stayed there.
"You poor dear old boy!" she said. And then, "Don't you care, Roddy!"
He returned the caress with interest, before he seemed to realize the
different significance of it. Then he pushed her away by the shoulders and
held her where he could look into her face.
"What do you mean?" he asked. "Don't care about what?"
It didn't seem like bravado—like an acted out pretense, and yet of course
it must be.
"Don't," she said. "Because I know. I've known all day. I read it in the
paper this morning."
From puzzled concern, the look in his face took on a deeper intensity.
"Tell me what it is," he said very quietly. "I don't know. I didn't read the
paper this morning. Is it Harriet?" Harriet was his other sister—married,
and not very happily, it was beginning to appear, to an Italian count.
A revulsion—a sort of sick misgiving took the color out of Rose's cheeks.
"It isn't any one," she said. "It's nothing like that. It's—it's that case." Her
lips stumbled over the title of it. "It's been decided against you. Didn't you
know?"

For a moment his expression was simply the absence of all expression
whatever. "Good lord!" he murmured. Then, "But how the dickens did you
know anything about it? How did you happen to see it in the paper? How
did you know the title of it?"
"I was in the court the day you argued it," she said unevenly. "And when I
found they printed those things in the paper, I kept watch. And to-day ..."
"Why, you dear child!" he said. And the queer ragged quality of his voice
drew her eyes back to his, so that she saw, wonderingly, that they were
bright with tears. "And you never said a word, and you've been bothering
your dear little head about it all the time. Why, you darling!"
He sat down on the edge of the table, and pulled her up tight into his arms
again. She was glad to put her head down—didn't want to look at his face;
she knew that there was a smile there along with the tears.
"And you thought I was worrying about it," he persisted, "and that I'd be
unhappy because I was beaten?" He patted her shoulder consolingly with a
big hand. "But that's all in the day's work, child. I'm beaten somewhere
nearly as often as I win. And really, down inside, leaving out a little
superficial pleasure, I don't care a damn whether I win or lose. A man
couldn't be any good as a lawyer, if he did care, any more than a surgeon
could be any good if he did. You've got to keep a cold mind or you can't do
your best work. And if you've done your best work, there's nothing to care
about. I honestly haven't thought about the thing once from that day to this.
Don't you see how it is?"
He couldn't see how it was, that was plain enough. What he very
reasonably expected was that after so lucid an explanation, she would turn
her wet face up to his, with her old wide smile on it. But that was not what
happened at all. Instead, she just went limp in his arms, and the sobs that
shook her seemed to be meeting no resistance whatever. It wasn't like her to
work herself up in that way over trifles, either; yet, surely a trifle was all
this could be called—a laughable mistake he couldn't help loving her for, or
a touching demonstration of affection that he couldn't help smiling at.
Either way you took it, it was nothing to make a scene about. Where was

her sense of humor? That was the thing to do—get her quiet first, and then
persuade her to laugh at the whole affair with him.
He was saved from carrying out this program by the fact that Rose, of her
own accord, anticipated him. At least she controlled, rather suddenly, her
sobs, sat up, wiped her eyes and, after a fashion, smiled. Not at him,
though; resolutely away from him, he might almost have thought—as if she
didn't want him to see.
"That's right," he said, craning round to make sure that the smile was
there. "Have a look at the funny side of it."
She winced at that as from a blow and pulled herself away from him.
Then she controlled herself and, in answer to his look of troubled
amazement, said:
"It's all right. Only it happens that you're the one who d-doesn't know
how awfully funny it really is." Her voice shook, but she got it in hand
again. "No, I don't mean anything by that. Here! Give me a kiss and then let
me wash my face."
And for the whole evening, and again next morning until he left the
house, she managed to keep him in the only half-questioning belief that
nothing was the matter.
It was about an hour after that, that her maid came into her bedroom,
where she had had her breakfast, and said that Miss Stanton wanted to see
her.

CHAPTER VI

THE DAMASCUS ROAD

It argued no real lack of sisterly affection that Rose didn't want to see
Portia that morning. Even if there had been no other reason, being found in
bed at half past ten in the morning by a sister who inflexibly opened her
little shop at half past eight, regardless of bad weather, backaches and other
potentially valid excuses, was enough to make one feel apologetic and
worthless. Rose could truthfully say that she was feeling wretched. But
Portia would sit there, slim and erect, in a little straight-backed chair, and
whatever perfunctory commiseration she might manage to express, the look
of her fine eyebrows would be skeptical. Justly, too. Rose could never deny
that. Not so long as she could remember the innumerable times when she
had yielded to her mother's persuasions that she was over-tired and that a
morning in bed was just what she needed. Portia, so far as she could
remember, had never been the subject of these persuasions.
But this was only the beginning of Rose's troubles to-day. She was paying
the price of yesterday's exaltation and her spirits had sunk down to
nowhere. What a fool's paradise yesterday had been with its vision of her
big self-sufficient husband coming to her for mothering because he had lost
a law-suit! What a piece of mordant irony it was, that she should have
found herself, after all her silly hopes, sobbing in his arms, while he
comforted her for her bitter disappointment over not being able to comfort
him! She had told the truth when she said he was the one, really, who didn't
know how funny it was.
Well, and wasn't her other effort just as ridiculous? If ever he found her
heap of law-books and learned of the wretched hours she had spent trying to
discover what they were all about in the hope of promoting herself to a true
intellectual companionship with him, wouldn't he take the discovery in
exactly the same way—be touched by the childish futility of it and yet
amused at the same time—cuddle her indulgently in his arms and soothe
her disappointment;—and then urge her to look at the funny side of it? He
must know hundreds of practising lawyers. Were there a dozen out of them
all whose minds had the power to stimulate and bring into action the full
powers of his own?

Well then, what was the use of trying? If James Randolph was right—and
it seemed absurd to question it—she had just one charm for her husband—
the charm of sex. To that she owed her hours of simulated companionship
with him, his tenderness for her, his willingness to make her pleasures his
own. To that she owed the extravagantly pretty clothes he was always
urging her to buy—the house he kept her in—the servants he paid to wait
on her. Well then, why not make the best of it?
Only, if she went on much longer, feeling sick and faded like this, she'd
have nothing left to make the most of, and then where would she be?
Oh, she was getting maudlin, and she knew it! And when she got over
feeling so weak and giddy, she'd brace up and be herself again. But for the
present, she didn't feel like seeing Portia.
But Rose's shrinking from a talk with Portia that morning was a mild
feeling compared with Portia's dread of the impending talk with Rose.
Twice she had walked by the perfect doorway of the McCrea house before
she entered it; ostensibly to give herself a little more time to think—really,
because she shrank from the ordeal that awaited her in there.
Her sister's ménage had been a source of irritation to Portia ever since it
was established, though a deeper irritation was her own with herself for
allowing it to affect her thus. Rose's whole-hearted plunge into the
frivolities of a social season, her outspoken delight in it, her finding in it,
apparently, a completely satisfactory solution to the problem of existence,
couldn't fail to arouse Portia's ironic smile. This was the sort of vessel her
mother had freighted with her hopes! This was the course she steered.
She had fought this feeling with a bitter self-contempt. The trouble with
her was, she told herself in icy self-communings, that she envied Rose her
happiness, her opportunities, her husband—even her house. Why should all
that wonderful furniture have been wasted on Rose, to whom a perfect old
Jacobean gate-legged table was nothing but a surface to drop anything on
that she wanted out of her hands? Why should a man of Rodney's powerful
intelligence waste his time on her frivolous amusements, content,
apparently, just to sit and gaze at her, oblivious of any one else who might

happen to be about? She knew that she, Portia, out of her disciplined
experience of life, and her real eagerness for knowledge of it, was better
able to challenge the attention of his mind than Rose. And yet she had never
really got it. She remained half invisible to him—some one to be
remembered with a start, after an interval of oblivion, and treated
considerately—even affectionately, for that matter—as Rose's sister!
They had been seeing each other with reasonable frequency all winter.
The Aldriches had Portia and her mother in to a family dinner pretty often,
and always came out to Edgewater for a one-o'clock dinner with the
Stantons on Sunday. The habit was for Rose to come out early in the car and
take them to church, while Rodney walked out later, and turned up in time
for dinner.
Mrs. Stanton had taken a great liking to Rodney. His manner toward her
had just the blend of deference and breezy unconventionality that pleased
her. So, while Portia would worry through the dinner, for fear it wouldn't be
cooked well enough, or served well enough, not to present a sorry contrast
to the meals her guests were accustomed to, her mother would sit beaming
upon the pair with a contentment as unalloyed as if Rose were the
acknowledged new leader of the great Cause and her husband her adoring
convert, as they had been in her old day-dream.
As far as Rodney went, the dream might have been true, for he showed an
unending interest in the Woman Movement—never tired of drawing from
his mother-in-law the story of her labors and the exposition of her beliefs.
Sometimes he argued with her playfully in order to get her started. More
often, and as far as Portia could see, quite seriously, he professed himself in
full accord with her views.
After this had been going on for about so long, Rose would yawn and
stretch and sit down on the arm of her mother's chair, begin stroking her
hair and offering her all manner of quaint unexpected caresses. And then,
pretty soon, Rodney's attention to the subject would begin to wander and at
last flag altogether and leave him stranded, gazing and unable to do
anything but gaze, at the lovely creature—the still miraculous creature,

who, when he got her home again, would come and sit on the arm of his
chair like that! When this happened, Portia found it hard to stay in the room.
Until Mrs. Stanton's terrifying illness along in January, these meetings
constituted the whole of the intercourse between the families. Rose had
done her best to carry Portia with her, to some extent at least, into her new
life—to introduce her to her new friends and make her, as far as might be,
one of them. And in this she was seconded very amiably, by Frederica. But
Portia had put down a categorical veto on all these attempts. She hadn't the
inclination nor the energy, she said, and her mother needed all the time she
could spare away from her business. Once, when Rose pressed the matter,
she gave a more genuine reason. Rose's new friends, she said, would regard
her introduction to them solely as a bid for business. She didn't want them
coming around to her place to buy their wedding presents "in order to help
out that poor old maid sister of Rose Aldrich's." She was getting business
enough in legitimate ways.
Sometimes she told herself that if Rose had really wanted her, she'd have
pressed the matter harder—wouldn't have given up unless she was clutching
with real relief at an excuse that let her out of an embarrassment. But at
other times she accused herself of having acted in a petty snobbish spirit in
declining the chance not only for pleasant new friendships, especially
Frederica's, but for a closer association with her sister. Well, the thing was
done now, and the question certainly never would rise again.
The reason why it couldn't arise again was what Portia came to tell Rose
this morning. She hoped she'd be able to tell it gently—provide Rose with
just the facts she'd have to know, and get away without letting any other
facts escape, so that afterward she'd have the consolation of being able to
say to herself, "That was finely done." All her life, she told herself, she had
been doing fine things grudgingly, mutilating them in the doing. If she
weren't very careful, that would happen this morning. If she could have
known the truth and made her resolution, and confided it to Rose during the
first hours of her mother's illness, when the fight for life had drawn them
together, it would not have been hard. But with the beginning of
convalescence, when Rose, with an easy visit and a few facile caresses,
could outweigh in one hour, all of Portia's unremitting tireless service

during the other twenty-three, and carry off as a prize the whole of her
mother's gratitude and affection, the old envy and irritation had come back
threefold.
Rose greeted her with a "Hello, Angel! Why didn't you come right up?
Isn't it disgraceful to be lying around in bed like this in the middle of the
morning?"
"I don't know," said Portia. "Might as well stay in bed, if you've nothing
to do when you get up." She meant it to sound good-humored, but was
afraid it didn't. "Anyhow," she added after a straight look into Rose's face,
"you look, this morning, as if bed was just where you ought to be. What's
the matter with you, child?"
"Nothing," said Rose, "—nothing that you'd call anything at any rate."
Portia smiled ironically. "I'm still the same old dragon, then," she said.
And then, with a gesture of impatience, turned away. She hadn't meant to
begin like that. Why couldn't she keep her tongue in control!
"I only meant," said Rose very simply, "that you'd say it was nothing, if it
was the matter with you. I've seen you, so many times, get up looking
perfectly sick and, without any breakfast but a cup of black coffee, put on
your old mackintosh and rubbers and start off for the shop, saying you were
all right and not to bother, that I knew that was what you'd say now, if you
felt the way I do."
"I'm sorry," said Portia. "I might have known that was what you meant. I
wonder if you ever want to say ugly things and don't, or if it's just that it
never occurs to you to try to hurt anybody. I didn't mean to say that either.
I've had a rather worrying sort of week."
"What is it?" said Rose. "Tell me about it. Can I help?"
"No," said Portia. "I've thought it over and it isn't your job." She got up
and went to the window where Rose couldn't see her face, and stood
looking out. "It's about mother," she concluded.

Rose sat up with a jerk. "About mother!" she echoed. "Has she been ill
again this week? And you haven't let me know! It's a shame I haven't been
around, but I've been busy"—her smile reflected some of the irony of
Portia's—"and rather miserable. Of course I was going this afternoon."
"Yes," said Portia, "I fancied you'd come this afternoon. That's why I
wanted to see you alone first."
"Alone!" Rose leaned sharply forward. "Oh, don't stand there where I
can't see you! Tell me what it is."
"I'm going to," said Portia. "You see, I wasn't satisfied with old Murray.
That soothing bedside manner of his, and his way of encouraging you as if
you were a child going to have a tooth pulled, drove me nearly wild. I
thought it was possible, either that he didn't understand mother's case, or
else that he wouldn't tell me what he suspected. So a week ago to-day, I got
her to go with me to a specialist. He made a very thorough examination,
and the next day I went around to see him." Her voice got a little harder and
cooler. "Mother'll never be well, Rose. She's got an incurable disease.
There's a long name for it that I can't remember. What it means is that her
heart is getting flabby—degenerating, he called it. He says we can't do
anything except to retard the progress of the disease. It may go fast, or it
may go slowly. That attack she had was just a symptom, he said. She'll have
others. And by and by, of course, a fatal one."
Still she didn't look around from the window. She knew Rose was crying.
She had heard the gasp and choke that followed her first announcement of
the news, and since then, irregularly, a muffled sound of sobbing. She
wanted to go over and comfort the young stricken thing there on the bed,
but she couldn't. She could feel nothing but a dull irresistible anger that
Rose should have the easy relief of tears, which had been denied her.
Because Portia couldn't cry.
"He said," she went on, "that the first thing to do was to get her away
from here. He said that in this climate, living as she has been doing, she'd
hardly last six months. But he said that in a bland climate like Southern
California, in a bungalow without any stairs in it, if she's carefully watched

all the time to prevent excitement or over-exertion, she might live a good
many years.
"So that's what we're going to do. I've written the Fletchers to look out a
place for us—some quiet little place that won't cost too much, and I've sold
out my business. I thought I'd get that done before I talked to you about it.
I'll give the house here to the agent to sell or rent, and as soon as we hear
from the Fletchers, we'll begin to pack. Within a week, I hope."
Rose said a queer thing then. She cried out incredulously, "And you and
mother are going away to California to live! And leave me here all alone!"
"All alone with the whole of your own life," thought Portia, but didn't say
it.
"I can't realize it at all," Rose went on after a little silence. "It doesn't
seem—possible. Do you believe the specialist is right? They're always
making mistakes, aren't they—condemning people like that, when the
trouble isn't what they say? Can't we go to some one else and make sure?"
"What's the use?" said Portia. "Suppose we did find a man who said it
probably wasn't so serious as that, and that she could probably live all right
here? We shouldn't know that he was right—wouldn't dare trust to that.
Besides, if I drag mother around to any more of them, she'll know."
Rose looked up sharply. "Doesn't she know?"
"No," said Portia in that hard even voice of hers. "I lied to her of course. I
told her the doctor said her condition was very serious, and that the only
way to keep from being a hopeless invalid would be to do what he said—go
out to California—take an absolute rest for two or three years—no lectures,
no writing, no going about.
"You know mother well enough to know what she'd do if she knew the
truth about it. She'd say, 'If I can never be well, what's the use of prolonging
my life a year, or two, or five; not really living, just crawling around half
alive and soaking up somebody else's life at the same time?' She'd say she
didn't believe it was so bad as that anyway, but that whether it was or not,
she'd go straight along and live as she's always done, and when she died,

she'd be dead. Don't you know how it's always pleased her when old people
could die—'in harness,' as she says?"
Her voice softened a little as she concluded and the tenseness of her
attitude, there at the window, relaxed. The ordeal, or the worst of it, was
over; what she had meant to say was said, and what she had meant not to
say, if hinted at once or twice, had not caught Rose's ear. She turned for the
first time to look at her. Rose was drooping forlornly forward, one arm
clasped around her knees, and she was trying to dry her tears on the sleeve
of her nightgown. The childlike pathos of the attitude caught Portia like the
surge of a wave. She crossed the room and sat down on the edge of the bed.
She'd have come still closer and taken the girl in her arms but for the fear of
starting her crying again.
"Yes," Rose said. "That's mother. And I guess she's right about it. It must
be horrible to be half alive;—to know you're no use and never will be. Only
I don't believe it will be that way with her. I believe you told her the truth
without knowing it. It's just a feeling, but I'm sure of it. She'll get strong and
well again out there. You'll think so, too, when you get rested up a little.—
You're so frightfully tired, poor dear. It makes me sick to think what a week
you've had. And that you've gone through it all alone;—without ever giving
Rodney and me a chance to help. I don't see why you did that, Portia."
"Oh, I saw it was my job," Portia said, in that cool dry way of hers. "It
couldn't work out any other way. It had to be done and there was no one
else to do it. So what was the use of making a fuss? It was easier, really,
without, and—I didn't want any extra difficulties."
"But all the work there must have been!" Rose protested. "Selling your
shop, and all. How did you ever manage to do it?"
"That was luck, of course," Portia admitted. "Do you know that Craig
woman? You may have met her. She's rather on the fringe of your set, I
believe. She's got a good deal of money and nothing to do, and I think she's
got a fool notion that it'll be chic to go 'into trade.' She came and offered to
buy me out a month ago, and of course I wouldn't listen. But just by luck
she called me up again the very day I went to talk to the specialist. I asked

for twenty-four hours to think it over, and by that time I'd made up my
mind. I got a very good price from her, really. She bought the whole thing;
lease, stock and good-will."
It wasn't more than a very subconscious impression in the back of Rose's
mind, that Portia must be pretty callous and cold to have been able on the
very day of the doctor's sentence to look as far ahead as that, and to drive a
good bargain on the next—awfully efficient, anyway. "I wish I was more
like you," she said.
But she didn't want to be questioned as to just what she meant by it and,
aware that Portia had just shot a queer searching look at her, she changed
the subject, or thought she did.
"Anyway, I'm glad it worked out so well for you," she went on; "selling
the shop so easily, and all. And I believe it'll do you as much good as
mother. Getting a rest.... You do need it. You're worked right down to the
bones. And out there where it's warm and bright all the time, and you don't
have to get up in the dark any more winter mornings and wade off through
the slush to the street-car.... And a nice little bungalow to live in—just you
and mother.... I—I sort of wish I was going too."
Portia laughed—a ragged, unnatural sounding laugh that brought a look
of puzzled inquiry from Rose.
"Why, nothing," Portia explained. "It was just the notion of your leaving
Rodney and all you've got here—all the wonderful things you have to do—
for what we'll have out there. The idea of your envying me is something
worth a small laugh, don't you think?"
Rose's head drooped lower. She buried her face in her hands. "I do envy
you," she said. There was a dull muffled passion in her voice. "Why
shouldn't I envy you? You're so cold and certain all the time. You make up
your mind what you'll do, and you do it. I try to do things and just make
myself ridiculous. Oh, I know I've got a motor and a lot of French dresses,
and a maid, and I don't have to get up in the morning, because, as you say, I
have nothing else to do—and I suppose that might make some people
happy."

"You've got a husband," said Portia in a thin brittle voice. "That might
count for something, I should think."
"Yes, and what good am I to him?" Rose demanded. "He can't talk to me
—not about his work or anything like that. And I can't help him any way.
I'm something nice for him to make love to, when he feels like doing it, and
I'm a nuisance when I make scenes and get tragic. And that's all. That's—
marriage, I guess. You're the lucky one, Portia."
The silence had lasted a good while before Rose noticed that there was
any special quality about it—became aware that since the end of her
outburst—of which she was ashamed even while she yielded to it, because
it represented not what she meant, but what, at the moment, she felt—Portia
had not stirred; had sat there as rigidly still as a figure carved in ivory.
Becoming aware of that, she raised her head. Portia wasn't looking at her,
but down at her own clenched hands.
"It needed just that, I suppose," she heard her older sister say between
almost motionless lips. "I thought it was pretty complete before, but it took
that to make it perfect—that you think I'm the lucky one—lucky never to
have had a husband, or any one else for that matter, to love me. And lucky
now, to have to give up the only substitute I had for that."
"Portia!" Rose cried out, for the mordant alkaline bitterness in her sister's
voice and the tragic irony in her face, were almost terrifying. But the outcry
might never have been uttered for any effect it had.
"I hoped this wouldn't happen," the words came steadily on, one at a
time. "I hoped I could get this over and get away out of your life altogether
without letting it happen. But I can't. Perhaps it's just as well—perhaps it
may do you some good. But that's not why I'm doing it. I'm doing it for
myself. Just for once, I'm going to let go! You won't like it. You're going to
get hurt."
Rose drew herself erect and a curious change went over her face, so that
you wouldn't have known she'd been crying. She drew in a long breath and
said, very steadily, "Tell me. I shan't try to get away."

"A man came to our house one day to collect a bill," Portia went on, quite
as if Rose hadn't spoken. "Mother was out, and I was at home. I was
seventeen then, getting ready to go to Vassar. Fred was a sophomore at Ann
Arbor, and Harvey was going to graduate in June. You were only seven—I
suppose you were at school. Anyhow, I was at home, and I let him in, and
he made a fuss. Said he'd have us black-listed by other grocers, if it wasn't
paid.
"It was the first I ever knew about anything like that. I knew we weren't
rich, of course—I never had quite enough pocket money. But the idea of an
old unpaid grocery bill made me sick. I talked things over with mother the
next day—told her I wasn't going to college—said I was going to get a job.
I got her to tell me how things stood, and she did, as well as she could. The
boys were getting their college education out of the capital of father's estate,
so that the income of it was getting smaller. She had meant that I should do
the same. But the income wasn't really big enough to live on as it was.
"Mother could earn money of course, lecturing and writing, but money
wasn't one of the things she naturally thought about, and when there was
something big and worth while to do, she plunged in and did it whether it
was going to pay her anything or not. And there were you coming along,
and mother wasn't so very strong even then, and I—well, I saw where I
came in.
"I got mother to let me run all the accounts after that, and attend to
everything. And I got a job and began paying my way within a week."
"If I had a thing like that to remember," said Rose unsteadily, "I'd never
forget to be proud of it so long as I lived!"
"I wish I could be proud of it," said Portia. "But, like everything else I do,
I spoiled it. I knew that mother was doing a big fine work worth doing—
worth my making a sacrifice for, and I wanted to make the sacrifice. But I
couldn't help making a sort of grievance of it, too. In all these years I've
always made mother afraid of me—always made her feel that I was,
somehow, contemptuous of her work and ideas. That's rather a strong way

of putting it, perhaps. But I've seen her trying to hide her enthusiasms from
me a little, because of my nasty way of sticking pins in them.
"Oh, of course in a way I was making the enthusiasms possible—I knew
that. She never could have gone on as she did if she'd been nagged at all the
time for money. Big ideas are always more important to her than small
facts, but without some narrow-minded, literal person to look after the facts
her ideas wouldn't have had much chance. I grubbed away until I got things
straightened out, so that her income was enough to live on—enough for her
to live on. I'd pulled her through. But then ..."
"But then there was me," said Rose.
"I thought I was going to let you go," Portia went on inflexibly. "You'd
got to be just the age I was when I went to work, and I said there was no
reason why you shouldn't come in for your share. If things had happened a
little differently, I'd have told mother how matters stood and you'd have got
a job somewhere and gone to work. But things didn't come out that way—at
least I couldn't make up my mind to make them—so you went to the
university. I paid for that, and I paid for your trousseau, and then I was
through."
Rose was trembling, but she didn't flinch. "Wh—what was it," she asked
quietly, "what was it that might have been different and wasn't? Was it—
was it somebody you wanted to marry—that you gave up so I could have
my chance?"
Portia's hard little laugh cut like a knife. "I ought to believe that," she
said. "I've told myself so enough times. But it's not true. I wonder why you
should have thought of that—why it occurred to you that a cold-blooded
fish like me should want to marry?"
Rose didn't try to answer. She waited.
"You have always thought me cold," Portia said. "So has mother. I'm not,
really. I'm—the other way. I don't believe there ever was a girl that wanted
love and marriage more than I. But I didn't attract anybody. I was working
pretty hard, of course, and that left me too tired to go out and play—left me

a little cross and acid most of the time. But I don't believe that was the
whole reason. It wouldn't have worked out that way with you. But nobody
ever saw me at all. The men I was introduced to forgot me—were polite to
me—got away as soon as they could. They were always craning around for
a look at somebody else. The few men—the two or three who weren't like
that, weren't good enough. But a man did want me to marry him at last, and
for a while I thought I would. Just—just for the sake of marrying somebody.
He wasn't much, but he was some one. But I knew I'd come to hate him for
not being some one else and I couldn't make up my mind to it. So I took
you on instead.
"I stopped hoping, you see, and tried to forget all about it—tried to crowd
it out of my life. I said I'd make my work a substitute for it. And, in a way, I
succeeded. The work opened up and got more interesting as it got bigger. It
wasn't just selling four-dollar candlesticks and crickets and blue glass
flower-holders. I was beginning to get real jobs to do—big jobs for big
people, and it was exciting. That made it easier to forget. I was beginning to
think that some day I'd earn my way into the open big sort of life that your
new friends have had for nothing.
"And then, a week ago, there came the doctor and cut off that chance. Oh,
there's no way out, I know that! That's the way the pattern was cut, I
suppose, in the beginning. I've always suspected the cosmic Dressmaker of
having a sense of humor. Now I know it. I'm the lucky one who isn't going
to have to wade through the slush any more. I'm to go out to southern
California and live in a nice little bungalow and be a nurse for five or ten
years, and then I'm going to be left alone in genteel poverty, without an
interest in the world, and too tired to make any. And I'll probably live to
eighty.
"And yet,"—she leaned suddenly forward, and the passion that had been
suppressed in her voice till now, leaped up into flame—"and yet, can you
tell me what I could have done differently? I've lived the kind of life they
preach about—a life of noble sacrifice. It hasn't ennobled me. It's made me
petty—mean—sour. It's withered me up. Look at the difference between us!
Look at you with your big free spaciousness—your power of loving and

attracting love! Why, you even love me, now, in spite of all I've said this
morning. I've envied you that—I've almost hated you for it.
"No, that's a lie. I've wanted to. The only thing I could ever hate you for,
would be for failing. You've got to make good! You've had my share as well
as yours—you're living my life as well as yours. I'm the branch they cut off
so that you could grow. If you give up and let the big thing slip out of your
hands the way you were talking this morning, because you're too weak to
hold it and haven't pluck enough to fight for it...."
"Look at me!" said Rose. The words rang like a command on a battle-
field.
Portia looked. Rose's blue eyes were blazing. "I won't do that," she said
very quietly. "I promise you that." Then the hard determination in her face
changed to something softer, and as if Portia's resistance counted no more
than that of a child, she pulled her sister up in her arms and held her tight.
And so at last Portia got the relief of tears.

CHAPTER VII

HOW THE PATTERN WAS CUT

Through the two weeks that intervened before Portia and her mother left
for the West, Rose disregarded the physical wretchedness—which went on
getting worse instead of better—and dismissed her psychical worries until
she should have time to attend to them. She helped Portia pack, she
presented a steady cheerful radiance of optimism to her mother, that never
faltered until the last farewells were said.
Just how she'd take up the fight again for the great thing Portia had
adjured her not to miss, she didn't know. She supposed she'd go back to her
law-books—at any rate until she could work out something better.
But the pattern, it seemed, was cut differently. She went to the doctor's
office the day after Portia took her mother away, and discovered the cause
of her physical wretchedness. She was pregnant.

CHAPTER VIII

A BIRTHDAY

Rodney heard young Craig, who deviled up law for him, saying good
night to the stenographer; glanced at his watch and opened the door to his
outer office.
"You may go home, Miss Beach," he said. "I'm staying on for a while but
I shan't want you." Then, to the office boy: "You, too, Albert."
He waited till he heard them go, then went out and disconnected his own
desk telephone, which the office boy, on going home, always left plugged
through; went back into his inner office again and shut the door after him.
There was more than enough pressing work on his desk to fill the clear
hour that remained to him before he had to start for home. But he didn't
mean to do it. He didn't mean to do anything except drink down thirstily the
sixty minutes of pure solitude that were before him; to let his mind run free
from the clutch of circumstance. That hour had become a habit with him
lately, like—he smiled at the comparison—like taking a drug. When
something happened that forced him to forego it, he felt cheated—
irrationally irritable. He was furtive about it, too. He never corrected Rose's
assumption that the thing which kept him late at the office so much of the
time nowadays was a press of work. He even concealed the fact that he
pulled his telephone plug, by sticking it back again every night just before
he left.
He tried to laugh that guilty feeling out of existence. But he couldn't. He
knew too well whence it sprang. He knew whom he was stealing that hour
from. It wasn't the world in general he intrenched himself against. It was his
wife. The real purpose of that sixty minutes was to enable him to stop
thinking and feeling about her.
It was not that she had faded for him—become less the poignant, vivid,
irresistible thing he had first fallen in love with. Rather the contrary. The
simple rapture of desire that had characterized the period of their
engagement and the first months of their marriage, had lost something—not
so much, either—of its tension. But it had broadened—deepened into

something more compelling, more pervasive—more, in his present mood,
formidable.
She hadn't seemed quite well, lately, nor altogether happy, and he had not
been able to find out why. He had attributed it at first to the shock
occasioned by her mother's illness and her departure with Portia to
California, but this explanation seemed not to cover the ground. Why
couldn't she have talked freely with him about that? Inquiries about her
health, attempts—clumsily executed, no doubt—to treat her with special
tenderness and guard her against overexertion, only irritated her, drove her
to the very edge of her self-control—or over it. She was all right, she
always said. He couldn't force confidences from her of course. But her pale
face and eyes wide with a trouble in them he could not fathom stirred
something deeper in him than the former glow and glory had ever reached.
And there was a new thing that gripped him in a positively terrifying way
—a realization of his importance to her. The after-effect of her invasion of
his office the night of the Randolphs' dinner and of his learning of the
tremulous interest with which she had afterward followed the case he was
then working on, had been very different from his first irritation and his first
amusement.
He had discovered, too, one day—a fortnight or so ago, in the course of a
rummage after some article he had mislaid, a heap of law-books that weren't
his. He had guessed the explanation of them, but had said nothing to Rose
about it—had found it curiously impossible to say anything. If only she had
taken up something of her own! It seemed as essentially a law of her being
to attempt to absorb herself in him, as it was a law of his to resist that
absorption of himself in her.
But resistance was difficult. The tendency was, after his perfectly solid,
recognizable duties had been given their places in the cubic content of his
day, that Rose should fill up the rest. It was as if you had a bucket half full
of irregularly shaped stones and filled it up with water. And yet there was a
man in him who was neither the hard-working, successful advocate, nor
Rose's husband—a man whose existence Rose didn't seem to suspect. (Was

there then in her no woman that corresponded to him?) That man had to
fight now for a chance to breathe.
He got a pipe out of a drawer in his desk, loaded and lighted it, stretched
his arms, and sat down in his desk chair. In the middle of his blotter was a
stack of papers his stenographer had laid there just before she went out. On
top of the heap was a memorandum in her handwriting, and mechanically
he read it.
"Please ask Mrs. Aldrich about this bill," it read. "The work done seems
to be the same that was paid for last month."
The rest of the month's bills lay beneath, all neatly scheduled and totaled;
and the total came to more than three thousand dollars. He damned them
cordially and moved them over to one side.
But the mood of quiet contentment he had, for just a moment, captured,
had given place to angry exasperation. He felt like a bull out in a ring
tormented by the glare and the clamor and the flutter of little red flags.
There was nothing ruinous about his way of living. Including his
inherited income with what he could earn, working the way he had been
working lately, he could meet an expenditure of thirty-six thousand dollars
a year well enough. It meant thinking about his fees of course, seeing to it
that the work he undertook was profitable as well as interesting. Only,
declared the man who was not Rose's husband, it was senseless—
suffocating! Rodney tried, with an athletic sweep of his will, to crowd that
train of thought out of his mind as, with his hand, he had swept the papers
that gave rise to it.
He leaned his elbows on the cleared blotter and propped up his chin on
his fists. The thing exactly in front of his eyes was his desk calendar. There
was something familiar about the date—some subconscious association that
couldn't quite rise to the surface. Was there something he had to do to-day,
that he'd forgotten? No, Miss Beach would have reminded him of anything
except a social engagement. And he distinctly remembered that Rose had
said this morning that the evening was clear. And yet, surely ... Then, with a

grunt of relief and amusement, he got it. It was his birthday! Another mile-
stone.
Where had he been, what had he been doing a year ago to-day? It would
be interesting if he could manage to remember.
A year ago—why, good lord! That was the day it had all begun. He'd sold
the old house that day and then had started to walk over to Frederica's for
dinner, and got caught in the rain and taken a street-car. He had heard a
vibrant young voice say, "Don't dare touch me like that," and, turning, had
seen the blazing glorious creature who held the conductor pinned by both
wrists. That had been Rose—his Rose; whom he was spending these sixty
minutes out of the twenty-four hours trying to forget about!
And that was only a year ago. It was curiously hard to realize. Their
identities had shifted so strangely—his own as well as hers. Well, and in
what direction had, he changed? How did he compare—the man who sat
here now, with the man who had unhesitatingly jumped off the car to follow
a new adventure—the man who had turned up water-logged at Frederica's
dinner and made hay of her plan to marry him off to Hermione Woodruff?
They had had a great old talk that night, Frederica and he, he
remembered. He remembered what he had talked about, and he smiled
grimly over the recollection—space and leisure; the defective intelligence
that trapped men into cluttering their lives with useless junk; so many
things to have and to do that they couldn't turn around without breaking
something. Had he been a fool then, or was he a fool now? Both, perhaps.
But how old Frederica must have grinned over the naiveté of him. Which of
the two of him in her candid opinion would be the better man?
He believed he could answer that question. Oh, he was succeeding all
right—increasing his practise, making money, getting cautious—prudent;
he didn't bolt the track any more. And the quality of his work was good, he
couldn't quarrel with that. Only, the old big free dreams that had glorified it,
were gone. He was in harness, drawing a cart; following a bundle of hay.
He sprang impatiently to his feet, thrust back his chair so violently as he
did so that it tipped over with a crash. The one really footling, futile, fool

thing to do, was what he was doing now—lamenting his old way of life and
making no effort to recapture it! Let him either accept the situation, make
up his mind to it and stop complaining, or else offer it some effective
resistance—sweep the flummery out of his life—clear decks for action.
Well, and that was the most asinine consideration of all. Because of
course he couldn't do one thing or the other. As long as the man who wasn't
Rose's husband remained alive in him, he'd protest—struggle—clamor for
his old freedom. And yet, as long as the million tiny cords that bound hum,
Gulliver-like, went back to Rose, talk of breaking them was sophomoric
foolishness. He'd better go home!
The building was pretty well deserted by now, and against the silence he
heard the buzzer in his telephone switchboard proclaiming insistently that
some one was trying to get him on the telephone. His hour of recollection
hadn't been a success, but the invasion of it irritated him none the less. He
thought at first he wouldn't answer. He didn't care who was on the wire. He
didn't want to talk to anybody. But no one can resist the mechanical bell-
ringers they use in exchanges nowadays—the even-spaced ring and wait,
ring and wait, so manifestly incapable of discouragement. At the end of
forty-five seconds, he snatched open his door, punched the jack into its
socket, caught up the head-piece, and bellowed, "Hello!" into the dangling
transmitter.
And then the look of annoyance in his face changed to one of incredulous
pleasure. "Good God!" he said. "Is that you, Barry Lake? Are you here in
Chicago? And Jane, too? How long you going to be here?... Lord, but that's
immense!"
And five minutes later he was calling Rose on the wire. "Rose, listen to
this! Barry Lake and his wife are here. He just called up. They got in from
New York at five o'clock, and I've asked them out to dinner. Barry Lake and
Jane! What's the matter? Can't you hear me?... Why, they're about the best
friends I've got. The magazine writer, you know, and his wife. And they're
coming out to dinner—coming right out. I told them not to dress. I'll come
straight home myself—get there before they do, I guess.... Why, Rose,
what's the matter? Aren't you well? Look here! If you're below par, and

don't feel like having them come, I can call it off and go over to the hotel
and dine with them.... You'd rather we came out to the house? You're sure?
Because they won't mind a bit. I can take them to a restaurant or
anywhere.... All right, if you're sure it won't be too much for you. I'll be
home in fifteen minutes. Lord, but it was good to hear old Barry's voice
again! I haven't seen him for over a year. You're sure you'd rather?... All
right. Good-by."
But he sat there frowning in a puzzled sort of way for half a minute after
he'd pulled the plug. Rose's voice had certainly sounded queer. He was sure
she hadn't planned anything else for to-night. He distinctly remembered her
saying just before he left for the office that they'd have the evening to
themselves. And it was incredible that she minded his bringing home two
old friends like the Lakes on the spur of the moment, to take pot-luck. Oh,
well, you couldn't tell about people's voices over the telephone. There must
have been something funny about the connection.
An opportune taxi just passing the entrance to his office building as he
came out, enabled him to better the fifteen minutes he'd allowed for getting
home. But in spite of this he found Rose rather splendidly gowned for her
expected guests.
"Good gracious!" he cried excitedly. "What did you do that for? I thought
I told you over the phone the Lakes weren't going to dress."
"I was—dressed like this when you telephoned," Rose said. "And I was
afraid there wouldn't be time to change into anything else."
"We weren't going anywhere, were we?" he asked. "There's nothing I've
forgotten?"
"No," she said, "we weren't going anywhere."
"And you dressed like that just for a—treat for me?"
She nodded. "Just for you," she said. "Roddy, who are the Lakes? Oh, I
know his articles, I think! But where were they friends of yours, and
when?"

"Why, for years, until they moved to New York. They used to live here. I
know I must have told you about them. I was always having dinner with
them—either out in Rogers Park, where they lived, or at queer, terrible little
restaurants down-town. They were always game to try anything, once. He's
the longest, leanest, angularest, absent-mindedest chap in the world. And
just about the best. And his wife fits all his angles. She's a good chap, too.
That's the way you have to think of her. They're a great pair. She writes, too.
Oh, you're sure to like them! They're going to be out here for months, he
says. He's going to specialize in women, and he's come back here where
they've got the vote and all, to make headquarters. Lord, but it's great! I
haven't had a real talk with anybody since he went away, over a year ago!"
Then, at the sound of the bell, he cried out, "There they are!" and dashed
down into the hall ahead of the parlor maid, as eagerly as a schoolboy
anticipating a birthday present.
Rose followed more slowly, and by the time she had reached the landing
she found him slapping Barry on the back and shaking both hands with
Jane, and trying to help both of them out of their wraps at once.
The last thing she could have thought of just then, was of making, for
herself, an effective entrance on the scene. But it worked out rather that
way. The three of them, Rodney and the Lakes, at the foot of the stairs, in
the clothes they had been working and traveling in all day, looked up
simultaneously and saw Rose, gowned for a treat for Rodney, on the first
landing; a wonderful rose-colored Boucher tapestry (guaranteed authentic
by Bertie Willis) on the wall behind her for a background, and the carved
Gothic newel-post bringing out the whiteness of the hand that rested upon
it. The picture would have won a moment's silence from anybody. And
Barry and Jane simply gazed at her wide-eyed.

Barry and Jane gazed at her wide-eyed.

Rodney was the first to speak. "It's really the Lakes, Rose. I couldn't quite
believe it till I saw them. And the lady on the landing," he went on, turning
to his guests, "is really my wife. It's all a little incredible, isn't it?"
When the greetings were over and they were on the way up-stairs again,
he said: "I told Rose we weren't going to dress, but she explained she didn't
put on this coronation robe for you, but for a treat for me before I
telephoned, and hadn't time to change back."
And when Jane cried out, as they entered the drawing room, "Good
heavens, Rodney, what a house!" he answered: "It isn't ours, thank God! We
rented it for a year in a sort of honeymoon delirium, I guess. We don't live
up to it, of course. Nobody could, but the woman who built it. But we do
our damnedest."

The gaiety in his voice clouded a little as he said it, and his grin, for a
moment, had a rueful twist. But for a moment only. Then his untempered
delight in the possession of his old friends took him again and, with the
exception of one or two equally momentary cloud-shadows, lasted all
evening.
They talked—heavens how they talked! It was like the breaking up of a
log-jam. The two men would rush along, side by side, in perfect agreement
for a while, catching each other's half expressed ideas, and hurling them
forward, and then suddenly they'd meet, head on, in collision over some
fundamental difference of opinion, amid a prismatic spray of epigram. Jane
kept up a sort of obbligato to the show, inserting provocative little
witticisms here and there, sometimes as Rodney's ally, sometimes as her
husband's, and luring them, when she could, into the quiet backwaters of
metaphysics, where she was more than a match for the two of them. Jane
could juggle Plato, Bergson and William James, with one hand tied behind
her. But when she incautiously ventured out of this domain, as occasionally
she did—when, for example, she confessed herself in favor of a censorship
of the drama, she was instantly demolished.
"The state's got no business with morals," said Barry.
"That's the real cause of most of our municipal corruption," said Rodney.
"A city administration, for instance, is corrupt exactly in ratio to its attempt
to be moral. The more moral issues you import into politics—gambling,
prostitution, Sunday closing, censored movies, and the rest—the more
corrupt and helpless and inefficient your government will be." And,
between them, for the next half-hour, they kept on demonstrating it until the
roar of their heavy artillery fairly drove Jane from her trenches.
But all this was preliminary to the main topic of the evening, which got
launched when Rodney seized the advantage of a pause to say:
"A series of articles on women, eh! What are you going to do to them?"
With that the topic of feminism was on the carpet and it was never
thereafter abandoned. "Utopia to Brass Tacks," was the slogan Barry's chief
had provided him with, he said. We were about the end of the heroic age of

the movement, the age of myths and saints and prophecies. A transition was
about due to smaller, more immediate things. The quality of the leaders
would probably change. The heroines of the last three or four decades,
women like Naomi Rutledge Stanton, to take a fine type of them.
"She's my mother," said Rose.
Barry Lake's aplomb was equal to most situations, but it failed him here;
for a moment he could only stare. The contrast between the picture in his
mind's eye, of the plain, square-toed, high-principled and rather pathetic
champion of the Cause—pathetic in the light of what she hoped from it—
facing indifference and ridicule with the calm smile of one who has climbed
her mountain and looked into the promised land,—between that and the
lovely, sensitive, sensuous creature he was staring at, was enough to stagger
anybody. He got himself together in a moment, said very simply and
gravely how much he admired her and how high a value, he believed, the
future would put on her work; then he picked up his sentence where Rose
had broken it.
The heroines and the prophets were going to be replaced, he believed, by
leaders much more practical and less scrupulous, and the movement would
follow the leaders. As far as polities went, he not only looked for no
millennium, but for a reaction in the other direction. There'd be more open
graft, he thought.
Rose asked him if he meant that he thought women were less honest than
men.
"It isn't a lack of old-fashioned honesty that makes a man a grafter," he
said. "It's seeing the duties and privileges of a public office in a private and
personal way, instead of in a public, impersonal one; being kind to old
friends who need a helping hand, and grateful to people who've held out
helping hands to you. Well, and women have been trained for hundreds of
years to see things in that private and personal way, and to exalt the private
and personal virtues. Just as they've been trained to stick to rule of thumb
methods that more or less work, rather than to try experiments. So, on the
whole, I think their getting the vote will mean that politics will be

crookeder and more reactionary than they've been in a good many years. All
the same I'm for it, because it's a part of democracy, and I'm for democracy
all the way. Not because you get good government out of it; you don't. You
get as good as you deserve, and in the long run I think a society that has to
deserve as good a government as it gets, grows stronger and healthier than
one that gets a better government than it deserves."
"That old tory radical over there," said Jane, with a nod at Rodney, "has
been grinning away for half an hour without saying a word. I'd like to know
what you think about it."
"'Tory radical'?" questioned Rose.
"That's what Barry calls him," Jane explained. "He's so conservative
about the law that he calls Blackstone an upstart and a faker, but the things
he'd do, when it comes, down to cases—on good old common law
principles, of course, would make the average Progressive's hair curl. Why,
when people were getting excited over Roosevelt's recall of judicial
decisions—remember?—Rodney was for abolishing the Bill of Rights
altogether."
"What's the Bill of Rights?" asked Rose.
Jane headed Rodney off. "Oh, life, liberty and property without due
process of law," she said. "Neither of these men has any opinion of rights.
The only natural inalienable right you've got, they say, is to take what you
can get and keep it until somebody stronger than you, that you can't run
away from, catches you. What you call your individual rights are just what
society has made and doesn't for the moment need, to keep itself going. If it
does need them, it takes them back. Only, of course, it has got to keep itself
going. If it doesn't, people get up and kick it to bits and start again." She
turned to Rodney. "But what do you think about it, really? What Barry's
been talking about, I mean. Are you for it?"
"For what?" Rodney wanted to know.
"For what women want," said Jane. "Economic independence, equality,
easy divorce—all the new stuff."

"I'm not against it," Rodney said, "any more than I'm against to-morrow
being Tuesday. It's going to be Tuesday whether I like it or not. But that
conviction keeps me from crusading for it very hard. What I'm curious
about is how it's going to work. When they get what they want, do you
suppose they're going to want what they get?"
"I knew there was something deadly about your grin," said Jane. "What
are you so cantankerous about?"
"Why, the thing," said Rodney, "that sours my naturally sweet disposition
is this economic independence. I've been hearing it at dinner tables all
winter. When I hear a woman with five hundred dollars' worth of clothes on
—well, no, not on her back—and anything you like in jewelry, talking
about economic independence as if it were something nice—jam on the
pantry shelf that we men were too greedy to let them have a share of—I
have to put on the brakes in order to stay on the rails.
"We men have to fight for economic independence from the time we're
twenty, more or less, till the time we die. It's a sentence to hard labor for
life; that's what economic independence is. How does that woman think
she'd set about it, to make her professional services worth a hundred dollars
a day—or fifty, or ten? What's she got that has a market value? What is
there that she can capitalize? She's got her physical charm, of course, and
there are various professions besides the oldest one, where she can make it
pay. Well, and what else?"
"She can bear children," said Jane. "She ought to be paid well for that."
"You're only paid well," Rodney replied, "for something you can do
exceptionally well, or for something that few people can do at all. As long
as the vast majority of women can bear children, the only women who
could get well paid for it would be those exceptionally qualified, or
exceptionally proficient. This is economics, now we're talking. Other
considerations are left out. No, I tell you. Economic independence, if she
really got it—the kind of woman I've been talking about—would make her
very, very sick."

"She'd get over being sick though, wouldn't she," said Rose, "after a
while? And then, don't you think she'd be glad?"
Rodney laughed. "The sort of woman I've been talking about," he said,
"would feel, when all was said, that she'd got a gold brick."
Rose poured his coffee with a steady hand. They were in the library by
now.
"If that's so," she said, "then the kind of woman you've been talking about
has already got a profession—the one you were just speaking of as—as the
oldest. As Doctor Randolph says, she's cashed in on her ankles. But maybe
you're mistaken in thinking she wouldn't choose something else if she had a
chance. Maybe she wouldn't have done it, except because her husband
wanted her to and she was in love with him and tried to please. You can't
always tell."
It was almost her first contribution to the talk that evening. She had asked
a few questions and said the things a hostess has to say. The other three
were manifestly taken by surprise—Rodney as well as his guests.
But surprise was not the only effect she produced. Her husband had never
seen her look just like that before (remember, he had not been a guest at the
Randolphs' dinner on the night he had turned her out of his office), the flash
in her eyes, the splash of bright color in her cheeks.
Barry saved him the necessity of trying to answer, by taking up the
cudgels himself. Rodney didn't feel like answering, nor, for the moment,
like listening to Barry. His interest in the discussion was eclipsed for the
moment, by the thrill and wonder of his wife's beauty.
He walked round behind her chair, on the pretext of getting his coffee
cup, and rested his hand, for an instant, on her bare shoulder. He was
puzzled at the absence of response to the caress. For there was none, unless
you could call it a response that she sat as still as ivory until he took his
hand away. And looking into her face, he thought she had gone pale.
Evidently though, it was nothing. Her color came back in a moment, and for
the next half-hour she matched wits with Barry Lake very prettily.

When Jane declared that they must go, her husband protested.
"I haven't managed yet to get a word out of Rodney about any of his
things. He dodged when I asked him how his Criminal Procedure Reform
Society was getting on, and he changed the subject when I wanted to know
about his model Expert Testimony Act." He turned on Rodney. "But there's
one thing you're not going to get out of. I want to know how far you've
come along with your book on Actual Government. It was a great start you
had on that, and a bully plan. I shan't let you off any details. I want the
whole thing. Now."
"I've had my fling," said Rodney, with a sort of embarrassed good humor.
"And I don't say I shall never have another. But just now, there are no more
intellectual wild-oats for me. What I sow, I sow in a field and in a furrow.
And I take good care to be on hand to gather the crop. Model Acts and
Reform of Procedure! Have you forgotten you're talking to a married man?"
On learning their determination to walk down-town, he said he'd go with
them part of the way. Would Rose go, too? But she thought not.
"Well, I can't pretend to think you need it," he admitted. Then, turning to
the Lakes: "You people must spend a lot of evenings with us like this.
You've done Rose a world of good. I haven't seen her look so well in a
month of Sundays."

CHAPTER IX

A DEFEAT

The gown that Rodney had spoken of apologetically to the Lakes as a
coronation robe, was put away; the maid was sent to bed. Rose, huddled
into a big quilted bath-robe, and in spite of the comfortable warmth of the
room, feeling cold clear in to the bones—cold and tremulous, and sure that
when she tried to talk her teeth would chatter—sat waiting for Rodney to
come back from seeing the Lakes part way home.
It was over an hour since they had gone, but she was in no hurry for his
return. She wanted time for getting things straight before he came—for
letting the welter subside and getting the two or three essentials clear in her
mind. She hadn't cried a tear.
The old Rose would have cried—the Rose of a month ago, before that
devastating, blinding scene with Portia, and what had happened since. She
even managed to smile a little satirically, now, over the way that child
would have taken it. Here it was their first anniversary of the day—the great
day in their two lives—their birthday, as well as his! And he'd forgotten it!
He had remained oblivious that morning, in spite of all the little evocative
references she had made. She hadn't let herself be hurt about that—not
much, anyway; had managed to smile affectionately over his masculine
obtuseness, as if it had meant no more to her than it would have, say, to
Frederica. She had impressed him strongly, though—or tried to—with the
idea that the evening was to be kept clear just for their two selves. And then
she had arranged a feast—a homely little feast that was to culminate in a
cake with a hedge of little candles around the edge for his birthday, and a
single red one in the center, for theirs.
Well, and that was only part of it. She had planned, when the cake should
have come in, all lighted up, and the servants had gone away and the other
lights had been put out,—she had planned to tell him her great news. She
hadn't told him yet, though it was over a fortnight since her visit to the
doctor.
She had no reasoned explanation of her postponement of it. The instinct
that led her to keep it wholly to herself, was probably one of the reflections
of that morning with Portia. She was still in a penitential mood when she
went to the doctor—a mood which the contemplation of Portia's frustrated

life and her own undeservedly happy one, had bitten deep into her soul. It
was a mood that nothing but pain could satisfy. The only relief she could
get during that fortnight of packing and leave-taking, came in flogging
herself to do hard things—things that hurt, physically and literally, I mean;
that made her back ache and cramped the muscles of her arms. Her spiritual
aches were too contemptible to pay any attention to.
Conversely, in that mood, the thing she couldn't endure, that made her
want to scream, was precisely what, all her life, she had taken for granted;
tenderness, concern, the smoothing away of little difficulties for which the
people about her had always sacrificed themselves. That mood made it hard
to go to the doctor. But, after she had fainted dead away twice in one
morning, a saving remnant of common sense—the reflection that if there
were anything organically wrong with her, it would be a poor trick to play
on Rodney, not to take remedial measures as soon as possible—dictated the
action.
When the doctor told her what had happened, she was a little bewildered.
She hadn't, in her mind, any prepared background for the news. She and
Rodney had decided at the beginning not to have any children for the first
year or two—in view of Rose's extreme youth, the postponement seemed
sensible—and the decision once made, neither of them had thought much
more about it.
Rodney's vigorously objective mind had always been so fully occupied
with things as they were that it found little leisure for speculation on things
as they might be. The day's work was always so vividly absorbing to him
that day-dreams never got a chance. His sex impulses had always been
crowded down to the smallest possible compass, not because he was a
Puritan, but because he was, spiritually and mentally, an athlete. He had
never thought of marriage as a serious possibility, Frederica's efforts to the
contrary notwithstanding, until, in a moment of bewilderment, he found
himself head over ears in love with Rose Stanton. That this emotion had
been able to fight its way into the fortress of his life spoke volumes for the
power and the vitality of it. Once it got inside, it formed a part of the
garrison of the fort. And, just as the contemplation of marriage had had to
wait until there was a Rose Stanton to make it concrete and irresistible, so

the contemplation of fatherhood would have to wait for a concrete fact to
drive it home.
With certain important differences, Rose was a good deal like him. She
had never had time to dream much. The pretending games of childhood—
playing with dolls, playing house—had never attracted her away from more
vigorous and athletic enterprises. A superb physique gave her an outlet for
her emotional energy, so that she satisfied her wants pretty much as she
became aware of them. And, conversely, she remained unaware of
possibilities she had not, as yet, the means to realize.
They were both rather abnormally normal about this. Persons of robust
emotions seldom think very much about them. The temperament that
cultivates its emotional soil assiduously, warms it, waters it and watches
anxiously for the first sprouts, gets a rather anemic growth for its pains.
Which of these facts is cause and which effect, one need not pretend to say:
whether it is a lack of vitality in the seed that prompts the instinct of
cultivation, or whether it is the cultivation that prevents a sturdy growth.
But, feeble as the results of cultivation may be, they produce at least the
apparent advantage of running true to form. The thing that sprouts in
cultivated soil will be what was planted there—will be, at all events,
appropriate.
But in Rose's penitential mood, and in the absence of a prepared
background, it was the processes of her pregnancy rather than the issue of
it, that got into the foreground of her mind. She was in for an experience
now that no one could call trivial. She had months of misery ahead of her,
she assumed, reasoning from the one she had just gone through with,
surmounted by hours of agony and peril that even Portia wouldn't deny the
authenticity of.
Well, she was glad of it; glad she was going to be hurt. She could get
back some of her self-respect, she thought, by enduring it all, first the
wretchedness, then the pain, with a Spartan fortitude. There would he a sort
of savage satisfaction in marching through all her miseries with her head
up.

She couldn't do that if Rodney knew. He wouldn't let her. He'd want to
care for her, comfort her, pack her in cotton-wool. And there was a terrible
yearning down in her heart, to let him. For just that reason, he mustn't be
told.
But, as the sharp edges of this mood wore off, she saw a little more justly.
Already he suspected something. She caught, now and again, a puzzled,
worried, almost frightened look in his face. It was a poor penance that
others had to share. So, at the end of her feast to-night, when the candles
were lighted and the servants gone away, she'd tell him. And, oh, what a
comfort it would be to have him know!
That was the moment she was waiting for when he telephoned that he
was bringing the Lakes out for dinner. The old Rose might well have cried.
But now, as she sat trembling in front of her little boudoir fire, the door
open behind her so that she'd surely hear him when he came in, the
disappointment and the hurt that had clutched at her throat when she turned
from the telephone, were wholly forgotten. As I said, she hadn't shed a tear.
The situation she was confronted with now was beyond tears. Portia's
stinging words went over and over through her mind. "If you let the big
thing slip out of your hands because you haven't the pluck to fight ..." and
her own, "I promise I won't do that." It would mean a fight. She must keep
her head.
She gave a last panicky shiver when she heard his latch-key, then pulled
herself together.
"Come in here, Roddy," she called, as he reached the head of the stairs. "I
want to talk about something."
He had hoped, evidently, to find her abed and fast asleep. His cautious
footfalls on the stairs made clear his intention not to waken her.
"Oh, I'm sorry," he said, pausing in the doorway to her dressing-room, but
not coming in. "I didn't know you meant to sit up for me. If I'd known you
were waiting, I'd have come back sooner. But we got to talking and we were
at the hotel before we knew it, and it was so long since I'd seen them ..."

"I haven't minded," she told him. "I've been glad of a chance to think. But
now ... Oh, please come in and shut the door!"
He did come in, but with manifest reluctance, and he stayed near the door
in an attitude of arrested departure.
"It's pretty late," he protested with a nonchalance that rang a little flat.
"You must be awfully tired. Hadn't we better put off our pow-wow?"
She understood well enough. The look in her face, some uncontrolled
inflection in the voice she had meant to keep so even, had given her away.
He suspected she was going to be "tragic." If he didn't look out, there'd be a
"scene."
"We can't put it off," she said. "I let you have your talk out with the
Lakes, but you'll have to talk with me now."
"We spent most of the time talking about you, anyway," he said
pleasantly. "They're both mad about you. Barry says you've got a fine
mind."
She laughed at that, a little raggedly. Whereupon Rodney looked hurt and
protested against this imputation of insincerity against his friend.
"When you know him better," he said, "you will see he couldn't say a
thing like that unless he meant it."
"Oh, he meant it, all right," said Rose. And she added incomprehensibly,
"It isn't his fault, of course. It's just the way the world's made."
She had been in good looks to-night, she knew; hurt, humiliated,
confronted with a crisis, she had rallied her powers just as she had done at
the Randolphs' dinner. She had been aware of the color in her cheeks, the
brightness in her eyes, the edge to her voice. Each of the two men had
responded to the effect she produced. Barry had talked with her all the last
part of the evening—brilliantly, eagerly, and had come away saying she had
a fine mind. Her husband had come across to her and put his hand on her
bare shoulder. And the two of them had responded to an identical impulse,

although they translated it so differently—one over the long circuit, the
other over the short.
Lacking the clue, Rodney, of course, didn't understand. The look in
Rose's eyes softened suddenly.
"Don't mind, dear;" she said. "I'm truly glad if they liked me. It will make
things a lot easier."
At that his eyes lighted up. "Do you seriously think any one could resist
you, you darling?" he said. "You were a perfect miracle to-night, when they
were here. But now, like this ..." He came over to her with his arms out.
But she cried out "Don't!" and sprang away from him. "Please don't,
Roddy—not to-night! I can't stand it to have you touch me to-night!"
He stared at her, gave a shrug of exasperation, and then turned away.
"You are angry about something then," he said. "I thought so when I first
came in. But I honestly don't know what it's about."
"I'm not angry," she said as steadily as she could. She mustn't let it go on
like this. They were getting started all wrong somehow. "You didn't want
me to touch you, the night when I came to your office, when you were
working on that case. But it wasn't because you were angry with me. Well,
I'm like that to-night. There's something that's got to be thought out. Only,
I'm not like you. I can't do it alone. I've got to have help. I don't want to be
soothed and comforted like a child, and I don't want to be made love to. I
just want to be treated like a human being."
"I see," he said. Very deliberately he lighted a cigarette, found himself an
ash-tray and settled down astride a spindling little chair. (It was lucky for
Florence McCrea's peace of mind that she didn't see him do it.) "All right,"
he said. "Now, come on with your troubles." He didn't say "little troubles,"
but his voice did and his smile. The whole thing would probably turn out to
be a question about a housemaid, or a hat.
Rose steadied herself as well as she could. She simply mustn't let herself
think of things like that. If she lost her temper she'd have no chance.

"We've made a horrible mistake," she began. "I don't suppose it's either of
our faults exactly. It's been mine in a way of course, because it wouldn't
have happened if I hadn't been—thoughtless and ignorant. I might have
seen it if I'd thought to look. But I didn't—not really, until to-night."
He wanted to know what the mistake was. He was still smiling in good-
humored amusement over her seriousness.
"It's pretty near everything," she said, "about the way we've lived—
renting this house in the first place."
He frowned and flushed. "Good heavens, child!" he said. "Can't you take
a joke? I didn't mean anything by what I said about the house—except that
—well, it is a precious, soulful, sacred—High Church sort of house, and
we're not the sort of people, thank God—I'll say it again—who'd have built
it and furnished it for ourselves. You aren't right, Rose. You're run down
and very tired and hypersensitive, or you wouldn't have spent an evening
worrying over a thing like that."
"You can make jokes about a thing that's true," she persisted. "And it's
true that you've hated the way we've lived—the way this house has made us
live.—No, please listen and let me talk. I can't help it if my voice chokes
up. My mind's just as cool as yours and you've got to listen. It isn't the first
time I've thought of it. It's always made me feel a little unhappy when
people have laughed about the 'new leaf' you've turned over; how 'civilized'
you've got, learning all the new dances and going out all the time and not
doing any of the—wild things you used to do. In a joking sort of way,
people have congratulated me about it, as if it were some sort of triumph of
mine. I haven't liked it, really. But I never stopped to think out what it
meant."
"What it does mean," he said, with a good deal of attention to his
cigarette, "is that I've fallen in love with you and married you and that
things are desirable to me now, because I am in love with you, that weren't
desirable before. And things that were desirable before, are less so. I don't
see anything terrible about that."
"There isn't," she said, "when—when you're in love with me."

He shot a frowning look at her and echoed her phrase interrogatively. She
nodded.
"Because you aren't in love with me all the time. And when you aren't,
you must see what I've done to you. You must—hate me for what I've done
to you. I remember the first day we ever talked—when you laughed at my
note-books. You talked about people who wore blinders and drew a cart and
followed a bundle of hay. That's what I've made you do."
His face flushed deep. He sprang to his feet and threw his cigarette into
the fire. "That's perfectly outrageous nonsense," he said. "I won't listen to
it."
"If it weren't true," she persisted, "you wouldn't be excited like that. If I
hadn't known it before, I'd have known it when I saw you with the Lakes.
You can give them something you can't give me, not with all the love in the
world. I never heard about them till to-night—not in a way I'd remember.
And there are other people—you spoke of some of them at dinner—who are
living here, that you've never mentioned to me before. You've tried to sweep
them all out of your life; to go to dances and the opera and things with me.
You did it because you loved me, but it wasn't fair to either of us, Roddy.
Because you can't love me all the time. I don't believe a man—a real man—
can love a woman all the time. And if she makes him hate her when he
doesn't love her, he'll get so he hates loving her."
"You're talking nonsense!" he said again roughly. He was pacing the
room by now. "Stark staring nonsense!"
Of course the reason it caught him like that was simply that it echoed so
uncannily the things that went through his own head sometimes in his
stolen hours of solitude—thoughts he had often tried, unavailingly, to stamp
out of existence.
"I'd like to know where you get that stuff. Is it from James Randolph?
He's dangerous, that fellow. Oh, he's interesting, and I like him, but he's a
cynic. He doesn't want anybody to be happier than he is. But what may be
true of him, isn't true of me. I've never stopped loving you since the first
day we talked together. And I should think I'd done enough to prove it."

"That's it," she said. "You've done too much. And you're so sorry for me
when you don't love me, that it makes you do all the more."
She had found another joint in his armor. She was absolutely clairvoyant
to-night, and this time he fairly cried out, "Stop it!"
Then he got himself together and begged her pardon. "After all, I don't
see what it comes to," he said. "I don't know what we're fighting about to-
night. You're saying you think we ought to do more playing around with the
Lakes and people like that; not spend all our time with the Casino set, as we
have done this winter. Well, that may be good sense. I've no objection
certainly."
"Well, then," she said, "that's settled—that's one thing settled. But there's
something else. Oh, it all comes to the same thing, really. Roddy,"—she had
to gulp and draw a long breath and steady herself before this—"Roddy, how
much money have you got, and how much are we spending?"
"Oh, good lord!" he cried. "Please don't go into that now, Rose. It's after
one o'clock, and you're worn to a frazzle. If we've got to go into it, let's do it
some other time, when we can be sensible about it."
"When I am, you mean?"
"Yes," he said.
"Well, I'm sensible now. I can't help it if my—voice chokes and my eyes
fill up. That's silly, of course, but down in my mind, I don't believe I've ever
been as sensible as I am right now. And I've had the nerve to ask—I don't
know when I will again—and I know you won't bring the subject up by
yourself. I've been trying to for ever so long. But money's always seemed
the one thing I couldn't b-bear to talk about with you.
"You see, when I first told mother and Portia about you—about how you
helped me with the conductor that night, I told them your name, and Portia
said she didn't think it could be you, because you were a millionaire. I
supposed she knew. Anyway, I didn't think very much about it. You
yourself,—just being with you and hearing you talk, were so much more
important. After we got engaged, and you began doing all sorts of lovely

things for me, I enjoyed it of course. But it was just something that went
with you. After we were married and took this house ... Well, I knew, of
course, I hadn't married you for money, but I thought it would sound sort of
queer and prying to ask questions about it; because I hadn't anything."
He had looked up two or three times and drawn in his breath for a protest,
but apparently he couldn't think of anything effective to say. Now though,
he cried out, "Rose! Please!"
But she went steadily on. "You were always so dear about it. You never
let me feel like a beggar, and—well, it was the easy way, and I took it. I got
worried once during the winter when I heard the Crawfords talking. All
those people were millionaires, I'd supposed. They were going on at a
dinner here, one night, about being awfully hard up, and I began to wonder
if we were. I spent a week trying to—get up my courage to ask you about it.
But then Constance got a new necklace on her birthday, and they went off
to Palm Beach the next week, so I persuaded myself it was all a joke. The
thing's come up again several times since, but never so that I couldn't side-
step it some way, until to-night. But to-night—oh, Roddy ...!" Her silly
ragged voice choked there and stopped and the tears brimmed up and
spilled down her cheeks. But she kept her face steadfastly turned to his.
"That's what I said about being married and not sowing wild oats, I
suppose," he said glumly. "It was a joke. Do you suppose I'd have said it if I
meant it?"
"It wasn't only that," she managed to go on. "It was the way they looked
at the house; the way you apologized for my dress; the way you looked
when you tried to get out of answering Barry Lake's questions about what
you were doing. Oh, how I despised myself! And how I knew you and they
must be despising me!"
"The one thing I felt about you all evening," he said, with the patience
that marks the last stage of exasperation, "was pride. I was rather crazily
proud of you."
"As my lover you were proud of me," she said. "But the other man—the
man that's more truly you—was ashamed, as I was ashamed. Oh, it doesn't

matter! Being ashamed won't accomplish anything. But what we'll do is
going to accomplish something."
"What do you mean to do?" he asked.
"I want you to tell me first," she said, "how much money we have, and
how much we've been spending."
"I don't know," he said stubbornly. "I don't know exactly."
"You've got enough, haven't you, of your own ... I mean, there's enough
that comes in every year, to live on, if you didn't earn a cent by practising
law? Well, what I want to do, is to live on that. I want to live however and
wherever we have to to live on that—out in the suburbs somewhere, or in a
flat, so that you will be free; and I can work—be some sort of help. Barry
and the others—your real friends, that you really care about, won't mind.
And as long as we want to get rid of the other people anyway, that's the way
to do it."
"You can wash the dishes and scrub the floors," he supplemented, "and I
can carry my lunch to the office with me in a little tin box." He looked at
his watch. "And now that the thing's reduced to an absurdity, let's go to bed.
It's getting along toward two o'clock."
"You don't have to get to the office till nine to-morrow morning," said
Rose. "And I want to talk it out now. And I don't think I said anything that
was absurd."
The devil of it was she hadn't. The precise quality about her suggestions
that pointed and barbed them, was their fantastic logic. It would be
ridiculous—impossible—to uproot their life as she wanted it done. One
simply couldn't do such a thing. Serious discussion of it was preposterous.
But to explain why ...! He was apt enough at explanations generally. This
one seemed to present difficulties.
"I shouldn't have called it absurd," he admitted after a rather long silence.
"But it's exaggerated and unnecessary. I don't care to make a public
proclamation that I'm not able to support you and run our domestic
establishment in a way that we find natural and agreeable;—and that I've

been a fool to try. The situation doesn't call for it. You've made a mountain
out of an ant-hill. When our lease is up, if we think this house is more than
we want, we can find something simpler."
"But we'll begin economizing now," she pleaded; "change things as much
as we can, even if we do have to go on living in this house. It won't hurt me
a bit to work, and you could go back to your book. We'd both be happier, if
I were something besides just a drag on you."
"Discharge a couple of maids, you mean," he asked, "and sweep and
make beds and that sort of thing yourself?"
"I don't know exactly how we'd do it," she said. "That's why I said I
needed your help in figuring it out. Something like that, I suppose.
Sweeping and making beds isn't very much, but it's something."
"The most we could save that way," he said, "would be a few hundred
dollars a year. It wouldn't be a drop in the bucket. But everything would run
at cross-purposes. You'd be tired out all the time—you're that pretty much
as it is lately, we'd have to stop having people in; you'd be bored and I'd be
worried. When you start living on a certain scale, everything about your life
has to be done on that scale. Next October, as I said, when the lease on this
house runs out, we can manage, perhaps, to change the scale a little. There
you are! Now do stop worrying about it and let's go to bed."
But she sat there just as she was, staring at the dying fire, her hands lying
slack in her lap, all as if she hadn't heard. The long silence irked him. He
pulled out his watch, looked at it and began winding it. He mended the fire
so that it would be safe for the night; bolted a window. Every minute or
two, he stole a look at her, but she was always just the same. Except for the
faint rise and fall of her bosom, she might have been a picture, not a
woman.
At last he said again, "Come along, Rose, dear."
"It'll be too late in October," she said. "That's why I wanted to decide
things to-night. Because we must begin right away." Then she looked up

into his face. "It will be too late in October," she repeated, "unless we begin
now."
The deep tense seriousness of her voice and her look arrested his full
attention.
"Why?" he asked. And then, "Rose, what do you mean?"
"We're going to have a baby in October," she said.
He stared at her for a minute without a word, then drew in a deep breath
and pressed his hands against his eyes. All he could say at first was just her
name. But he dropped down beside her and got her in his arms.
"So that's it," he said raggedly at last. "Oh, Rose, darling, it's such a
relief! I've been so terrified about you—so afraid something had gone
wrong. And you wouldn't let me ask, and you seemed so unhappy. I'd even
thought of talking to Randolph. I might have guessed, I suppose. I've been
stupid about it. But, you darling, I understand it all now."
She didn't see just what he meant by that, but she didn't care. It was such
a wonderful thing to stop fighting and let the tension relax, cuddle close
into his embrace, and know nothing in the world but the one fact that he
loved her; that their tale of golden hours wasn't spent—was, perhaps,
illimitable. She was even too drowsily happy to think what he meant when
he said a little later:
"So now you won't let anything trouble you, will you, child? And if queer
worrying ideas get into your head about the way we live, and about being a
drag on me and making me hate you, you'll laugh at them? You'll be able to
laugh, because you'll know why they're there."
It wasn't until the next day that she recalled that remark of his and
analyzed it. It meant, of course, that she was beaten; that her first fight for
the big thing had been in vain. There would be no use, for the present, in
renewing the struggle. He'd taken the one ground that was impregnable. So
long as he could go on honestly interpreting every plea of hers for a share in
the hard part of his life as well as in the soft part of it, for a way of life that
would make them something more than lovers—as wholly subjective to

herself, the inevitable accompaniment of her physical condition—the pleas
and the struggles would indeed be wasted. She'd have to wait.

CHAPTER X

THE DOOR THAT WAS TO OPEN

She would have to wait. Accepted, root and branch, as Rose was forced
by her husband's attitude to accept it, a conclusion of that sort can be a
wonderful anodyne. And so it proved in her ease. Indeed, within a day after
her talk with Rodney, though it had ended in total defeat, she felt like a
person awakened out of a nightmare. There had taken place, somehow, an
enormous letting-off of strain—a heavenly relaxation of spiritual muscles. It
was so good just to have him know; to have others know, as all her world
did within the next week!
Ultimately nothing was changed, of course. The great thing that she had
promised Portia she wouldn't fail in getting—the real thing that should
solve the problem, equalize the disparity between her husband and herself
and give them a life together in satisfying completeness beyond the joys of
a pair of lovers;—that was still to be fought for.
She'd have to make that fight alone. Rodney wouldn't help her. He
wouldn't know how to help her. Indeed, interpreting from the way he
winced under her questions and suggestions, as if they wounded some
essentially masculine, primitive element of pride in him, it seemed rather
more likely that he'd resist her efforts—fight blindly against her. She must
be more careful about that when she took up the fight again; must avoid
hurting him if she could.

She hadn't an idea on what lines the fight was to be made. Perhaps before
the time for its beginning, a way would appear. The point was that for the
present, she'd have to wait—coolly and thoughtfully, not fritter her strength
away on futile struggles or harassments.
The tonic effect of that resolution was really wonderful. She got her color
back—I mean more than just the pink bloom in her cheeks—and her old,
irresistible, wide slow smile. She'd never been so beautiful as she was
during the next six months.
People who thought they loved her before—Frederica for example, found
they hadn't really, until now. She dropped in on Eleanor Randolph one day,
after a morning spent with Rose, simply because she was bursting with this
idea and had to talk to somebody. That was very like Frederica.
She found Eleanor doing her month's bills, but glad to shovel them into
her desk, light up a cigarette, and have a chat; a little rueful though, when
she found that Rose was to be the subject of it.
"She's perfectly wonderful," Frederica said. "There's a sort of look about
her ..."
"Oh, I know," Eleanor said. "We dined there last night."
"Well, didn't it just—get you?" insisted Frederica.
"It did," said Eleanor. "It also got Jim. He was still talking about her
when I went to sleep, about one o'clock. I don't a bit blame him for being
perfectly maudlin about her. As I say, I was a good deal that way myself,
though a half-hour's steady raving was enough for me. But poor old Jim!
She isn't one little bit crazy about him, either—unfortunately."
"Unfortunately!" thought Frederica. This was rather illuminating. The
Randolphs' love-match had been regarded as establishing a sort of standard
of excellence. But when you heard a woman trying to arrange subsidiary
romances for her husband, or lamenting the failure of them, it meant, as a
rule, that things were wearing rather thin. However, she dismissed this
speculation for a later time, and went back to Rose.

"I had been worrying about her, too;" she said. "Rodney was so funny
about her. He was worried, I could see that. And he means the best in the
world, the dear. But he could be a dreadful brute, just in his simplicity. Oh, I
know! He and I were always rather special pals—more than Harriet. But no
man ever learned less from his sisters,—about women, I mean. He's always
been so big and healthy and even-minded, you couldn't tell him anything,
except what you could print right out in black and white. So when you were
feeling edgy and blue and miserable you either kept out of his way or kept
your troubles to yourself. He was always easy to fool—there was that about
it. If you wiped your eyes and blew your nose, he always thought you had a
cold. Which is all very nice about a brother; but in a husband ..."
Something that Eleanor did with her shoulders, the way she blew out her
smoke and twisted her mouth around, caught Frederica's eye. "What did
you mean by that?" she asked. "Oh, I know you didn't say anything."
Eleanor got up restlessly, squared the cushions on her chaise longue,
tapped her cigarette ash into a receiver and said that Rose was happy
enough now, anyway, if looks were anything to go by; hesitated again, and
finally answered Frederica's question.
"Why," she said, "whenever I hear a woman miaouling about being
misunderstood, I always want to tell her she doesn't know her luck. Wait till
she marries a man who really does understand—too well. Let her see how
she likes it, whenever she turns loose and gets—going a little, to have him
look interested, as if he were taking notes, and begin asking questions that
are—a little too intelligent. How does she think it'll feel never to know,
never—I mean that, that she isn't being—experimented on!"
It was a rather horrible idea, Frederica didn't try to deny it. But not being
understood wasn't very agreeable either. What did they want then?
Eleanor laughed. "Did you ever think," she asked, "that one of these
regular stage husbands would be rather satisfactory? Terribly particular, you
know, and bossy and domineering. The kind that discovers a letter or a
handkerchief or sees you going into some other man's 'rooms' and gets
frightfully jealous, and denounces you without giving you a chance to

explain, and drags you round by the hair and threatens to kill you? And then
discovers—in the last act, you know,—that you were perfectly innocent all
the while, and repents all over the place and begs you to forgive him and
take him back; and you do? Do you suppose any of the men we know
would be capable of acting like that? Don't you think we'd like it if they
were? Not if they really did those things, perhaps, but if we thought they
might?"
Frederica was amused, but didn't think there was much to that. Of course,
if the play was very thrilling, and you liked the leading man, you might
build yourself into the romance somehow. But when it came to the real
thing ...
"No, there is something in it," Eleanor insisted. "There's something you
can't get in any other way. Whom do you think I'd pick," she asked
suddenly, "for the happiest wife I know? Edith Welles. Yes, really. Oh, I
know, her husband's a slacker and no real good to anybody. And he goes out
every now and then and drinks too much and doesn't know just what
happens afterward. But he always comes back and wants to be forgiven.
And he thinks she's an angel,—which she is—and he thinks he isn't worthy
to put on her rubbers—which he isn't, and—well, there you are! She knows
she's got him, somehow.
"But you take Jim. I can get my way with him always. I can outmaneuver
him every time. He's positively simple about things, unless they happen to
strike him—professionally. But there's always something that gets away.
Something I'm no nearer now than I was the day I first saw him. And I
sometimes think that if there were—something horrible I had to forgive him
for—if I could get something on him as they say.... It's rather fun, isn't it,
sometimes, just to let your mind go wild and see where you bring up. Awful
rot, of course. Can you stop for lunch?"
Frederica thought she couldn't; must run straight along. But the talk had
been amusing. "Only—you won't mind?—don't spring any of that stuff on
Rose. She's just a child, really you know, and entitled to any illusions that
Rodney leaves; especially these days."

"You, as an old hen fussing about your new chicken!" Eleanor mocked.
"Wait till you can look the part a little better, Frederica, dear. But really, I'm
harmless. Talk to Jim and Rodney and those fearful and wonderful Lakes of
his. They were there, and—well, you ought to have heard the talk. I thought
I was pretty well hardened, but once or twice I gasped. Jim's pretty weird
when he gets going, but that Barry Lake has a sort of—surgical way of
discussing just anything, and his wife's as bad. Oh, she's awfully interesting,
I'll admit that, and she's as crazy about Rose as any of the rest of us, which
is to her credit.
"We never got off women all the evening. Barry Lake had their history
down from the early Egyptians, and Jim had an endless string of
pathological freaks to tell about. And then Rodney came out strong for
economic independence, only with his own queer angle on it of course. He
thought it would be a fine thing, but it wouldn't happen until the men
insisted on it. When a girl wasn't regarded as marriageable unless she had
been trained to a trade or a profession, then things would begin to happen. I
think he meant it, too, though he was more than usually outrageous in his
way of putting things.
"Well, and all the while there sat Rose, taking it all in with those big eyes
of hers, smiling to herself now and then; saying things, too, sometimes, that
were pretty good, though nobody but Jim seemed to understand, always,
just what she meant. They've talked before, those two. But she didn't mind
—anything; no more embarrassed than as if we'd been talking embroidery
stitches. You don't need to worry about her. And she absolutely seemed to
like Jane Lake."
Frederica did worry. Seriously meditated running in on Rodney before
she went home to lunch and giving him a tip that a young wife in Rose's
condition wanted treating a little more carefully. It was not for prudential
reasons that she decided against doing it. She was perfectly willing to have
her head bitten off in a good cause. But she knew Rodney down to the
ground; knew that it was utterly impossible for him, whatever his previous
resolutions might be, to pull up on the brink of anything. Once you
launched a topic that interested him, he'd go through with it. So the only
thing that would do any good would be to ban the Lakes and James

Randolph completely. And Rodney, if persuaded to do that—he would in a
minute, of course, if he thought it would be good for Rose—would be
incapable of concealing from her why he had done it; which would leave
matters worse than ever.
The only outcome, then, of her visit to Eleanor and her subsequent
cogitations, was that Martin, when he came home that night, found her
unusually affectionate and inclined to be misty about the eyes. "I'm a—
lucky guy, all right"—this was her explanation,—"being married to you.
Instead of any of the others."
He was a satisfactory old dear. He took her surplus tenderness as so much
to the good, and didn't bother over not knowing what it was all about.
Eleanor was right in her surmise that Rose had really taken a fancy to
Jane Lake. She was truly—and really humbly—grateful to Jane, in the first
place, for liking her, finding her, in Jane's own phrase, "worth while," and
her ideas worth listening to. Because here was something, you see, that she
could take at its face value. There was no long-circuited sex attraction to
discount everything, in Jane's case. But she had another reason.
Rodney, it seemed, had told the Lakes about the prospective baby the
very morning after he'd learned the news himself, and Jane—this was
perfectly characteristic of her—had come straight up to see Rose about it;
even before Frederica. And about the first thing she said was:
"Which do you want—a boy or a girl?"
Rose looked puzzled, then surprised. "Why," she said at last, "I don't
believe I know."
"It's funny about that," said Jane. "The one thing I was frightened about
—the first time, you know—was that it might be a girl. I think Barry really
wanted a girl, too. He does now, and we're going to try to have one, though
we can't rightly afford it. But I'm just primitive enough—I'm a cave person,
really—to have felt that having a girl, at least before you had a boy, would
be a sort of disgrace. Like the Hindoo women in Kipling. But don't you
really care?"

"Why, the queer thing is," said Rose, who had been in a daze ever since
Jane's first question, "that I hadn't thought of it as anything at all but—It.
Hardly that, really. I've known how miserable I've been, and that there were
things I must be careful not to do,—and, of course, what was going to
happen. But that when it was all over there'd be a baby left,—a—a son or a
daughter, why, that's ..."
Her surprise had carried her into a confidence that her budding friendship
for Jane was hardly ripe for, and she pulled up rather suddenly. "I didn't
know you had any children," she concluded, by way of avoiding a further
discussion of the marvel just then. "Are they here with you now?"
Jane explained why they were not. They weren't babies any more, two
husky little boys of five and three, and they were rejoicing in the care of a
grandmother and a highly competent nurse. "One of those terribly infallible
people, you know. Oh, I don't like it. I get a night letter every morning, and,
of course, if one of them got the sniffles I'd be off home like a shot. I'd like
to be a regular domestic mother; not let another soul but me touch them
(Jane really believed this) but you see we can't well afford it. Barry pays me
five dollars a day for working for him. I scout around and dig up material
and interview people for him—I used to be a reporter, you know. He'd have
to hire somebody, and it might better be me and keep the money in the
family. Because the nurse who takes my place doesn't cost near so much as
that. All the same, as I say, I don't half like it. You can preach the new stuff
till you're black in the face, but there's no job for a woman like taking care
of her own children."
Rose listened to all this, as well as to Jane's subsequent remarks, with
only so much attention as was required to keep her guest from suspecting
that she wasn't really listening at all. Jane didn't stay long. She had to go out
and earn Barry's five dollars—she'd lose her job if she didn't, so she said,
and Rose was presently left alone to dream, actually for the first time, of the
wonders that were before her.
What a silly little idiot she'd been not to have seen the thing for herself!
She'd been, all the while, beating her head against blind walls when there
was a door there waiting to open of itself when the time came. Motherhood!

There'd be a doctor and a nurse at first, of course, but presently they'd go
away and she'd be left with a baby. Her own baby! She could care for him
with her own hands, feed him—her joy reached an ecstasy at this—feed
him from her own breast.
That life which Rodney led apart from her, the life into which she had
tried with such ludicrous unsuccess to effect an entrance, was nothing to
this new life which was to open before her in a few short months now.
Meanwhile, she not only must wait; she could well afford to.
That was why she could listen with that untroubled smile of hers to the
terrible things that Rodney and James Randolph and Barry Lake and Jane
got into the way of hurling across her dinner table, and to the more mildly
expressed but equally alkaline cynicisms of Jimmy Wallace.
(Jimmy was dramatic critic on one of the evening papers, as well as a bit
of a playwright. He was a slim, cool, smiling, highly sophisticated young
man, who renounced all privileges as an interpreter of life in favor of
remaining an unbiased observer of it. He never bothered to speculate about
what you ought to do;—he waited to see what you did. He knew, more or
less, everybody in the world,—in all sorts of worlds. He was, for instance, a
great friend of Violet Williamson's and Bella Forrester's and was, at the
same time, on terms of avuncular confidence with Dotty Blott of the Globe
chorus. And he was exactly the same man to the three of them. He fitted
admirably in with their new circle.)
Well, in the light of the miraculous transformation that lay before her
Rose could listen undaunted to the tough philosophizings her husband and
Barry Lake delighted in as well as to the mordant merciless realities with
which Doctor Randolph and Jimmy Wallace confirmed them. She wasn't
indifferent to it all. She listened with all her might.
If there was anything in prenatal influence, that baby of hers was going to
be intelligent!

CHAPTER XI

AN ILLUSTRATION

So far as externals went, her life, that spring, was immensely simplified.
The social demands on her, which had been so insistent all winter, stopped
almost automatically. The only exception was the Junior League show in
Easter week, for which she put in quite a lot of work. She was to have
danced in it.
This is an annual entertainment by which Chicago sets great store. All the
smartest and best-looking of the younger set take part in it, in costumes that
would do credit to Mr. Ziegfeld, and as much of Chicago as is willing and
able to pay five dollars a seat for the privilege is welcome to come and
look. Delirious weeks are spent in rehearsal, under a first-class professional
director, audience and performers have an equally good time, and Charity,
as residuary legatee, profits by thousands.
Rose dropped in at a rehearsal one day at the end of a solid two hours of
committee work, found it unexpectedly amusing, and made a point
thereafter of attending when she could. Her interest was heightened if not
wholly actuated by some things Jimmy Wallace had been telling her lately
about how such things were done on the real stage.
He had written a musical comedy once, lived through the production of it,
and had spent a hard-earned two-weeks vacation trouping with it on the
road, so he could speak with authority. It was a wonderful Odyssey when
you could get him to tell it, and as she made a good audience she got the
whole thing—what everybody was like, from the director down, how the
principals dug themselves in and fought to the last trench for every line and
bit of business in their parts, and sapped and mined ahead to get, here or
there, a bit more;—how insanely hard the chorus worked....

The thing got a sociological twist eventually, of course, when Jane
wanted to know if it were true, as alleged by a prominent woman writer on
feminism, that the chorus-girls were driven to prostitution by inadequate
pay. Jimmy demolished this assertion with more warmth than he often
showed. He didn't know any other sort of job that paid a totally untrained
girl so well. There were initial requirements, of course. She had to have
reasonably presentable arms and legs and a rudimentary sense of rhythm.
But it took a really accomplished stenographer, for instance, to earn as
much a week as was paid the average chorus-girl. The trouble was that the
indispensable assets in the business were not character and intelligence and
ambition, but just personal charms.
Rose grinned across at Rodney. "That's like wives, isn't it?" she observed.
"And then," Jimmy went on, "the work isn't really hard enough, except
during rehearsals, to keep them out of mischief." Rose smiled again, but
didn't press her analogy any further. "But a girl who's serious about it, who
doesn't have to be told the same thing more than once, and catches on,
sometimes, without being told at all,—why, she can always have a job and
she can be as independent as anybody. She can get twenty-five dollars a
week or even as high as thirty. It's surprising though," he concluded,
"considering what a bunch of morons most of them are, that they work as
well as they do; turn up on time for rehearsals and performances, even
when they're feeling really seedy, stand the awful bawling out they get
every few minutes—because some directors are downright savages—and
keep on going over and over a thing till they're simply reeling on their pins,
without any fuss at all."
"They can always lose their job," said Barry. "There's great merit in that."
The latter part of this conversation was what she was to remember
afterward, but the thing which impressed Rose at the time, and that held her
for hours looking on at the League show rehearsals, was what Jimmy had
told her about the technical side of the work of production, the labors of the
director, and so on.

The League was paying their director three hundred dollars a week, and
by the end of the third rehearsal Rose decided that he earned it. The change
he could make, even with one afternoon's work, in the effectiveness, the
carrying power, of a dance number was astonishing. It wasn't at all a
question of good taste. There stood Bertie Willis simply awash with good
taste and oozing suggestions whose hopeless futility was demonstrated,
even to him, the moment an attempt was made to put them into effect. The
director was concerned with matters of fact. There were ascertained
methods of getting a certain range of effects and he knew what they were
and applied them—as well as the circumstances admitted. He was working
under difficulties, poor chap! Rose, enlightened by Jimmy Wallace, could
see that. A man habituated to bawling at a girl, when the spirit so moved
him, "Here, you Belmont! What do you think you're trying to do? You try
sleeping at night and staying awake at rehearsal. See how it works!"—
accustomed to the liberty of saying things like that, and then finding himself
under the necessity of swallowing hard and counting ten, and beginning
with an—"I think, if you don't mind ...!" was in a hard case.
Bertie Willis had his usefulness here. Sometimes Rose heard the director
whisper hoarsely, "For God's sake, don't let her do that! She can't do that!"
and then Bertie would intervene and accomplish wonders by diplomacy.
But it must be wonderfully exhilarating, Rose thought, to know exactly
why that girl was ridiculous and what to do to make her look right. And to
be able to sell your knowledge for three hundred dollars a week. This was
the sort of thing Rodney did, when one came to think of it. She wondered
whether he could sell his special sort of knowledge for as much. That must
be: the sort of possession Simone Gréville had had in mind when she said
that nothing worth having could be bought cheap. Neither Rodney nor the
director had found his specialty growing on a bush!
But her specialty, which in her life was to fill the place a knowledge of
stage dancing filled in the director's, was to come in a different way. You
paid a price, of course, for motherhood, in pain and peril, but it remained a
miraculous gift, for all that.

CHAPTER XII

WHAT HARRIET DID

She must wait for her miracle. As the weeks and months wore away, and
as the season of violent and high-frequency alternations between summer
and winter, which the Chicagoan calls spring, gave place to summer itself,
Rose was driven to intrench herself more and more deeply behind this great
expectation. It was like a dam holding back waters that otherwise would
have rushed down upon her and swept her away.
The problems went on mounting up behind the dam, of course. All the
minor luxuries of their way of living, which had been so keen a delight to
her during the first unthinking months of their married life; all the
sumptuous little elaborations of existence which she had explored with such
adventurous delight, had changed—now that she knew they had been
bought by the abridgment of her husband's freedom, by the invasion of the
clear space about himself which he had always so jealously guarded—into a
cloud of buzzing stinging distractions.
And they were the harder to bear now that she recognized how hard they
were going to be to drive away. It would have to be effected without
wounding Rodney's primitive masculine pride—without convicting him of
being an inadequate provider.
The baffling thing about him was that he had, quite unconsciously and
sincerely, two points of view. His affection for her, his wife, lover, mistress,
was a lens through which he sometimes looked out on the world. As she
refracted the facts of life for him they presented themselves in the primitive
old-fashioned way.

But there was another window in his soul through which he saw life with
no refractions whatever; remorselessly, logically. Looking through the
window, as he did when he talked to Barry Lake, or James Randolph, he
saw life as a mass of unyielding reciprocities. You got what you paid for.
You paid for what you got. And he saw both men and women—though
chiefly women—tangling and nullifying their lives in futile efforts to evade
this principle; looking for an Eldorado where something was to be had for
nothing; for panaceas; for the soft without the hard.
He was perfectly capable of seeing and describing an abstract wife like
that in blistering terms that would make an industrious street-walker look
almost respectable by comparison. But when he looked at Rose, he saw her
through the lens, as some one to be loved and desired,—and prevented, if
possible, from paying anything.
Somehow or other those two views must be reconciled before a life of
real comradeship between them was possible; before the really big thing she
had promised Portia to fight for could be anything more than a tormenting
dream.
Would the miracle solve this? It must. It was the only thing left to hope
for. In the shelter of the great dam she could wait serene.
And then came Harriet, and the pressure behind the dam rose higher.
Rose had tried, rather unsuccessfully, to realize, when during the earlier
days of her marriage she had heard Harriet talked about, that there was
actually in existence another woman who occupied, by blood anyway, the
same position toward Rodney and herself that Frederica did. She felt almost
like a real sister toward Frederica. But without quite putting the notion into
words, she had always felt it was just as well that Harriet was an Italian
contessa four thousand miles away. Rodney and Frederica spoke of her
affectionately, to be sure, but their references made a picture of a rather
formidably correct, seriously aristocratic sort of person. Harriet had always
had, Rose could see, a very effective voice in the family councils. She
hadn't much of a mind, perhaps; Rodney described it once as a small, well
oiled, easy running sort of mind that stitched away without misgivings, to

its conclusions. Rodney never could have been very fond of her. But she
had something he knew he lacked, and in matters which he regarded as of
minor importance—things that he didn't consider worth bothering much
about one way or the other—he'd submit to her guidance, it appeared,
without much question.
She had written, on the occasion of Rodney's marriage, a letter to Rose,
professing with perfect adequacy, to give her a sisterly welcome into the
family. But Rose felt pretty sure (a fragment of talk she overheard, an
impatient laugh of Rodney's, and Frederica's "Oh, that's Harriet of course,"
had perhaps suggested it) that the contessa regarded Rodney's marriage as a
mésalliance. She had entertained this notion the more easily because at that
time what Harriet thought—whatever Harriet might think—seemed a matter
of infinitesimal importance.
She'd discovered, along in the winter sometime, that Harriet's affairs were
going rather badly. Neither Rodney nor Frederica had gone into details. But
it was plain enough that both of them were looking for a smash of some
sort. It was in May that the cable came to Frederica announcing that Harriet
was coming back for a long visit. "That's all she said," Rodney explained to
Rose. "But I suppose it means the finish. She said she didn't want any fuss
made, but she hinted she'd like to have Freddy meet her in New York, and
Freddy's going. Poor old Harriet! That's rather a pill for her to swallow, if
it's so. We must try to cheer her up."
She didn't seem much in need of cheering up, Rose thought, when they
first met. All that showed on the contessa's highly polished surface was a
disposition to talk humorously over old times with her old friends,
including her brother and sister, and a sort of dismayed acquiescence in the
smoky seriousness, the inadequate civilization, the sprawling formlessness
of the city of her birth, not excluding that part of it which called itself
society.
In broad strokes, you could describe Harriet by saying she was as
different as a beautiful woman could be from Frederica. She wasn't so
beautiful as Frederica, to be sure, but together they made a wonderfully
contrasted pair—Harriet almost as perfect a brunette type as Frederica was

a blonde, and got up with her ear-rings and her hair and all to look rather
exotic. Her speech, too, and the cultivated things she could do with her
shoulders, carried out the impression. She had a trick—when she wanted to
be disagreeable an ill-natured observer would have said—of making
remarks in Italian and then translating them.
She wasn't disagreeable though—not malicious anyway, and the very
hard finish she carried, had been developed probably as a matter of
protection. She must have been through a good deal in the last few years.
She'd had two children stillborn, for one thing, and she was frankly afraid to
try it again. She never wanted any sympathy from anybody. If it came down
to that, she'd prefer arsenic. She resisted Rose's rather poignant charm, as
she resisted any other appeal to her emotions. With the charm left out, Rose
was simply a well meaning, somewhat insufficiently civilized young
person, the beneficiary, through her marriage with Rodney, of a piece of
unmerited good fortune. She didn't in the least mean to be unkind to her,
however, and didn't dream that she was giving Rose an inkling how she
thought of her.
Her manner toward this new member of the family was studiously
affectionate. She avoided being either disagreeable or patronizing. Rose
could see, indeed, how carefully she avoided it. She knew, too, that
Frederica saw the same thing and tried to compensate for it by a little extra
affectionateness. She even thought—though perhaps this was mere self-
consciousness—that she detected a trace of the same thing in Rodney.
The tie of blood is a powerful thing. Rose had never realized before how
powerful. With Harriet's arrival, she became aware of the Aldrich family as
a sodality—something she didn't belong to and never could. It was quite
true, as Frederica had said, that she and Rodney had always been special
pals. Harriet fitted into the family on the other side of Frederica from her
brother. She was a person with a good deal of what one calls magnetism,
and she attracted Frederica toward herself—made her, when she was about,
a somewhat different Frederica. She even attracted Rodney a little in the
same way.

The time of the year (it was after the end of the social season) made it
natural for them to be together a good deal. And of course Harriet's return,
after an absence of years, made them seek such meetings. The result was
that Rose, at the end of almost a year of marriage, got her first real taste of
lonesomeness. When the four of them were together, Rose felt like an
outsider intruding on intimates. They didn't mean her to feel that way—
made a distinct effort, Rodney and Frederica, anyway, to prevent her feeling
that way; which of course only pointed it. They had old memories to talk
about; old friendships. They had, like all close knit families, a sort of
shorthand language to talk in. If Rose came into the room where they were,
she'd often be made aware that the current subject of the conversation had
been dropped and a new one was getting started; or else there'd be laborious
explanations.
It wouldn't have mattered—not so much anyway, if Rose had had a
similar sodality of her own to fall back on—a mass of roots extending out
into indigenous soil. But Rose, you see, had been transplanted. Her two
brothers were hardly more than faint memories of her childhood. One was a
high-school principal down in Pennsylvania; the other a professor of history
at one of the western state universities. Both of them had married young
and had been very much married—on small incomes—ever since. The only
family she had that counted, was her mother and Portia. And they were
gone now to California.
She had had a world of what she called friends, of course, of her own age,
at the high school and at the university. But her popularity in those circles,
her easy way of liking everybody, and her energetic preoccupation with
things to do, had prevented any of these friendships from biting in very
deep. None of them had been solidly founded enough to withstand the
wavelike rush of Rodney Aldrich into her life. She had gone over altogether
into her husband's world. The world that had been her own, hadn't much
more existence, except for her mother and sister out in California, than the
memory of a dream.
But it took Harriet's arrival to make her realize this. And the realization,
when it was pressed home particularly hard, brought with it moments of
downright panic. Everything—everything she had in the world, went back

to Rodney. Except for him, she was living in an absolute vacuum. What
would happen if the stoutly twisted cable that bound her to him should be
broken, as the cable that bound Harriet to her husband was, apparently,
broken? What would she have then of which she could say, "This much is
mine"? Well, she'd have the child. That would be, partly at least, hers.
But Harriet's contribution to Rose's difficulties, to the mounting pressure
behind the dam, was destined to be more serious—more actual, anyway—
before very long.
The question where Rose and Rodney were going to live after their lease
on the McCrea house ended, had begun to press for an answer. October first
was when the lease expired and it wasn't far from the date at which they
expected the baby. Rose wouldn't be in any condition for house hunting
during the hot summer months. Things would have to be settled somehow
before then. A heavy calendar of important cases had kept Rodney from
giving as much attention to the problem as he himself felt it needed. He had
delighted Rose with the suggestion that they go out into the country
somewhere. Not the real country of course, but up along the shore, where
the train service was good and the motor a possible alternative.
They spent some very lovely afternoons during the early days of the
emerging spring, cruising about looking at possible places. They talked of
building at first, but long before they could make up their minds what they
wanted it had become too late for that, and they shifted to the notion of
buying an old place somewhere and remodeling it. One reason why they
made no more progress was because they were looking for such different
things. Rodney wanted acres. He'd never gardened a bit, and never would;
was an altogether urban person, despite the physical energy which took him
pounding off on long country walks. But when he heard there was a tract
just west of Martin Whitney's, up at Lake Forest, that could be had at a
bargain—thirty-five thousand dollars—he let his eye rove over it
appreciatively. And Frank Crawford and Howard West knew of
advantageous sites, also, on which to expatiate with convincing enthusiasm.
The kind of house you'd have to build on that sort of place would cost you
an easy thirty thousand more.

Rose didn't even yet know much about money, to be sure, but she knew
enough to be aghast at all that. What she tried to make Rodney look for was
a much more modest establishment—a yard big enough to hold a tennis
court, perhaps, and a house, well, that could be added to as they needed
room.
Neither of them stuck very close to the main point on these expeditions.
They always had too good a time together—more like a pair of children on
a picnic than serious home-hunters, and they frittered a good deal of time
away that they couldn't well afford.
This was the situation when Harriet took a hand in it. It was a situation
made to order for Harriet to take a hand in. She'd sized it up at a glance,
made up her mind in three minutes what was the sensible thing for them to
do, written a note to Florence McCrea in Paris, and then bided her
opportunity to put her idea into effect. She went out cruising with Rose in
the car two or three times, looking at places, but gave her no indications
that she felt more than the most languid interest in the problem. She could
seem less interested in a thing without being quite impolite, than any one
Rose knew.
When she got Florence McCrea's answer to her letter, she took the first
occasion to get Rodney off by himself and talk a little common sense into
him.
"What about where to live, Rodney?" she asked. "Made up your mind
about it yet? I suppose you know how many months there are between the
first of June and the first of October."
"We haven't got much of anywhere," he admitted. "We know we want to
live in the country, that's about all."
"Out in the country just as winter's getting started?" she asked. "Settling
into a new place—Rose with a new baby—everybody else back in town;—
simply no chance of keeping servants? Roddy, old man, you're entitled to
be a babe in the woods, of course. Any man is who does the kind of work
you do. But it is time some one with a little common sense straightened you
out about this."

Harriet couldn't be sure from the length of time he took seeing that his
pipe was properly alight, whether he altogether liked this method of
approach or not.
"Common sense always was a sort of specialty of yours, sis," he said at
last, "and straightening out. You were always pretty good at it." Then, out of
a cloud of his own smoke, "Fire away."
"Well, in the first place;" she said, "remodeling is the slowest work in the
world, and the fussiest. And you can't just tell an architect, with a wave of
the hand, to go ahead. You have to do your own fussing, which would drive
you crazy. If you had your house to-day, you'd be lucky if the paint was dry
and the thing was fit to move into by the first of September. And next
September, if it's blazing hot, won't be exactly the time for Rose to go
ramping around trying to buy furniture for a whole establishment—because
you haven't a stick yourselves, of course—and getting settled in, hiring
servants, getting the thing going. You can't be sure you'll have till the first
of October. Things like that don't always happen exactly as they are
expected to. But suppose you have good luck and manage it. Then where
are you? Out in the woods somewhere at the beginning of winter, just when
you ought to be settled comfortably somewhere in town.
"Oh, I know it's all very poetic, sitting in front of a roaring fire of logs,
while the wind bangs the shutters, and that sort of thing, Rose singing to the
baby and all. But you're not an Arcadian one bit. Neither is she, really, and
you'll simply perish out there, both of you, and be back in town before the
holidays.
"Rose oughtn't to be in town this summer. But she'll have to be to put this
through. She ought to be down at York Harbor, or one of those Cape Cod
places, instead of in this horrible smoky hole. Because she's not so very fit,
really do you think? Bit moody, I'd say."
"But good lord, Harriet, we've got to get out of here anyway, in October.
And that means we've got to have some sort of place to get into. It is an
awkward time, I'll admit."

"No, you haven't," she said. "You can stay right here another six months,
if you like. I've heard from Florence. I met her in Paris in April, and found
she wasn't a bit keen to come back and take this house on. Their securities
have gone down again, and they're feeling hard-up. Florence has got an old
barn of an atelier, and she's puttering around in the mud thinking she's
making statuary. Well, when I found how things stood here, I wrote and
asked her if she'd lease for six months more if she got the chance, and she
wrote back and simply grabbed at it. All you've got to do is to send her a
five-word cable and you're fixed. Then, next spring, when your troubles are
over, and you know what you want, you can look out a place up the shore
and have the summer there."
Rodney smoked half-way through his pipe before he made any comment
on this suggestion.
"This house isn't just what we want," he said. "In the first place, it's
damned expensive."
Harriet shrugged her shoulders, found herself a cigarette and lighted it;
picked up one of Florence's poetry books and eyed the heavily tooled
binding with a satirical smile before she replied. She could feel him looking
at her, and she knew he'd wait till she got ready to go on.
"I'd an idea there was that in it," she said at last. "Freddy said something
... Rose had been talking to her." Then after another little silence, and with a
sudden access of vehemence, "You don't want to go and do a regular fool
thing, Roddy. You're getting on perfectly splendidly. You'll be at the head of
the bar out here in ten years, if you keep on. Frank Crawford was telling me
about you the other day. You've settled down, and we thought you never
would. It was a corking move, your taking this house, just because it made
you settle down. You can earn forty thousand dollars next year, just with
your practise, if you want to. But if you pull up and go to live in a barn
somewhere, and stop seeing anybody—people that count, I mean ..."
Rodney grunted. "You're beyond your depth, sis," he said. "Come back
where you don't have to swim. The expense isn't a capital consideration, I'll
admit that. Now go on from there."

"That's like old times," she observed with a not ill-humored grimace. "I
wonder if you talk to Rose like that. Oh, I know the house is rather solemn
and absurd. It's Florence herself all over, that's the size of it, and I suppose
you are getting pretty well fed up with it. But what does that matter for six
months more? Heavens! You won't know where you're living. But the place
is comfortable, and there's room in it for nurses and all and the best doctor
in town in the line you'll want, is right around the corner. And, as I say,
when your troubles are over and you know what you want ..."
He pocketed his pipe and got up out of this chair.
"There's something in it," he admitted. "I'll think it over."
"Better cable Florence as soon as you can," she advised. "She'll want to
know ..."
Rose protested when the plan for living six months more in Florence
McCrea's house was broached to her. She made the best fight she could. But
Harriet's arguments, re-stated now by Rodney with full conviction, were too
much for her. When she broke down and cried, as she couldn't help doing,
Rodney soothed and comforted her, assured her that this notion of hers
about the expensiveness of it all, was just a notion—obsession was the word
he finally came to—which she must struggle against as best she could.
She'd see things in a truer proportion afterward.
Then it came out that he had made all his plans for a long summer
vacation. There was no court work in July and August anyway. He was
going to carry her off to a quiet little place out on Cape Cod that he knew
about, and just luxuriate in her; have her all to himself—not a soul they
knew about them. They would lie about in the sands all day, building air
castles. If she got tired of him, any person she wanted to see should be
telegraphed for forthwith. The one thing she had to bear in mind was that
she was to be happy and not bother about things; leave everything to him.
This plan was carried out, and in a paradise, made up of blue sea, white
sands, warm sun and Rodney—Rodney always there, and queerly content to
drowse away the time with her, she almost forgot the great dam and the
pressure of the waters that had mounted up behind it. Was it an obsession

just as Rodney said? Would she find when it was all over and she rallied
herself for the great endeavor, that there was, after all, no battle to be fought
—nothing but a baby at her breast?

CHAPTER XIII

FATE PLAYS A JOKE

Traveling bars flowing along parallel, black and white; the white ones
incandescent;—and a small helpless harried thing struggling to keep in the
shadow of the black ones, or to regain it again across the pitiless zone of
white that the little helpless thing called pain.—Traveling bars flowing
along endlessly.
And then a great ball whirling in planetary space, half dark, half
incandescent white, having for its sole inhabitant, the small harried thing
that struggled to keep in the dark out of the glare of that pitiless white pain.
—One watched its struggles from a long way off—like God.—But the ball
whirled drunkenly and it made one sick to look.—And then a supervening
chaos—no longer a ball but still whirling, reeling, tottering. Rectangles of
light, which, had they kept still, would have been windows—a mirror.
And then, very fine and small and weak, something that knew it was
Rose Stanton—Rose Stanton lying in a bed with people about her. She let
her eyes fall heavily shut again lest they should discover she was there and
want her to speak or think.
The bars came back, but the whiteness of them was no longer so white,
and slowly they faded out. Then, for a long time, nothing. Then sounds,
movements—soft, skilful, disciplined sounds and movements. And,

presently, a hand—a firm powerful hand, that picked up and supported a
heavy limp wrist—Rose Stanton's wrist—and two sensitive finger-tips that
rested lightly on the upper surface of it. After that, an even measured voice
—a voice of authority, whose words no doubt made sense, only Rose was
too tired to think what the sense was:
"She's out of the ether now, practically. That's a splendid pulse. She's
doing the best thing she can, sleeping like that. It's been a thoroughly
normal delivery from the beginning. Oh, a long difficult one, I'll admit. But
there's nothing now, that you could want better than what you've got."
And then another voice, utterly unlike Rodney's and yet unmistakably his
—a ragged voice that tried to talk in a whisper but couldn't manage it; broke
queerly.
"That's all right," it said. "But I'll find it easier to believe when ..."
She must see him—must know what it meant that he should talk like that.
With a strong physical effort, she opened her eyes and tried to speak his
name.
She couldn't; but some one must have been watching and seen, because a
woman's voice said quickly and quietly, "Mr. Aldrich."
And the next moment, vast and towering, and very blurred in outline, but,
like his voice, unmistakable, was Rodney—her own big strong Rodney. She
tried to hold her arms up to him, but of course she couldn't.
And then he shortened suddenly. He had knelt down beside her bed, that
was it. And she felt upon her palm, the pressure of his lips, and his
unshaven cheek, and on her wrist, a warm wetness that must be—tears.
Why was he crying? What had happened? She must try to think.
It was very hard. She didn't want to think, but she must. She must begin
with something she knew. She knew who she was. She was Rose—
Rodney's Rose. Here was his mouth down close to the pillow saying her
name over and over and over again. And she was in her own bed. But what
had happened? She must try to remember. She remembered something she

had said—said to herself over and over again an illimitable while ago. "It's
coming. The miracle's beginning." What had she meant by that?
And then she knew. The urgency of a sudden terror gave her her voice.
"Roddy," she said. "There was going to be a—baby. Isn't there?"
Something queerly like a laugh broke his voice when he answered. "Oh,
you darling! Yes. It's all right. That isn't why I'm crying. It's just because I'm
so happy."
"But the baby!" she persisted. "Why isn't it here?"
Rodney turned and spoke to some one else. "She wants to see," he said.
"May she?"
And then a woman's voice (why, it was the nurse, of course! Miss Harris,
who had come last night) said in an indulgent soothing tone, "Why, surely
she may. Wait just a minute."
But the wait seemed hours. Why didn't they bring the baby—her baby?
There! Miss Harris was coming at last, with a queerly bulky, shapeless
bundle. Rodney stepped in between and cut off the view, but only to slide
an arm under mattress and pillow and raise her a little so that she could see.
And then, under her eyes, dark red and hairy against the whiteness of the
pillow, were two small heads—two small shapeless masses leading away
from them, twitching, squirming. She stared, bewildered.
"There were twins, Rose," she heard Rodney explaining triumphantly, but
still with something that wasn't quite a laugh, "a boy and a girl. They're
perfectly splendid. One weighs seven pounds and the other six."
Her eyes widened and she looked up into his face so that the pitiful
bewilderment in hers was revealed to him.
"But the baby!" she said. Her wide eyes filled with tears and her voice
broke weakly. "I wanted a baby."
"You've got a baby," he insisted, and now laughed outright. "There are
two of them. Don't you understand, dear?"

Her eyes drooped shut, but the tears came welling out along her lashes.
"Please take them away," she begged. And then, with a little sob she
whispered, "I wanted a baby, not those."
Rodney started to speak, but some sort of admonitory signal from the
nurse silenced him.
The nurse went away with her bundle, and Rodney stayed stroking her
limp hand.
In the dark, ever so much later, she awoke, stirred a little restlessly, and
the nurse, from her cot, came quickly and stood beside her bed. She had
something in her hands for Rose to drink, and Rose drank it dutifully.
"Is there anything else?" the nurse asked.
"I just want to know," Rose said; "have I been dreaming, or is it true? Is
there a baby, or are there twins?"
"Twins, to be sure," said the nurse cheerfully. "The loveliest, liveliest
little pair you ever saw."
"Thank you," said Rose. "I just wanted to know."
She shut her eyes and pretended to go to sleep. But she didn't. It was true
then. Her miracle, it seemed somehow, had gone ludicrously awry.

CHAPTER XIV

THE DAM GIVES WAY

She began getting her strength back very fast after the next two or three
days, but this queer kink in her emotions didn't straighten out. She came to
see that it was absurd—monstrous almost, but that didn't help. Instead of a
baby, she had given birth to two. They were hers of course, as much as one
would have been. Only, her soul, which had been waiting so ecstatically for
its miracle—for the child which, by making her a mother, should supply
what her life needed—her soul wouldn't—couldn't accept the substitution.
Those two droll, thin voiced, squirming little mites that were exhibited to
her every morning, were as foreign to her, as detached from her, as if they
had been brought into the house in a basket.
There was a certain basis of reason back of this. At some time, during
those early hours of misty half-consciousness, it had been decided that two
children would be too much for her to attempt to nurse.
She had a notion that this idea hadn't originated with the doctor, though it
was he who had stated it to her with the most plausible firmness. Rodney
had backed the doctor up, firmly, too. Rose was only a girl in years—why,
just a child herself; hadn't had her twenty-second birthday yet; the labor had
been long, she was very weak, the children were big and vigorous, and she
couldn't hope to supply them both for more than a very few weeks, anyway.
And, at this time of year, as the doctor said, there was no difficulty to be
apprehended from bottle feeding. It would be better on all accounts.
Still, it didn't sound exactly like Roddy's idea either.
When Harriet came in for the first time to see her, Rose knew. Harriet
was living here now, running the house for Rodney, while Rose was laid up.
Doing it beautifully well, too, through all the confusion of nurses and all.
Not the slightest jar or creak of their complex domestic machinery ever
reached Rose in the big chamber where she lay. Harriet said:
"I think you're in great luck to have had two at once; get your duty to
posterity done that much sooner. And, of course, you couldn't possibly be
expected to nurse two great creatures like that."
Rose acquiesced. What was the use of struggling against so formidable a
unanimity? She would have struggled though, she knew, but for that queer

trick Fate had played her. Her heart ached, as did her breasts. But that was
for the lips of the baby—the baby she hadn't had!
When she found that struggling with herself, denouncing herself for a
brute, didn't serve to bring up the feelings toward the twins that she knew
any proper mother ought to have, she buried the dark fact as deep as she
could, and pretended. It was only before Rodney that the pretense was
necessary. And with him, really, it was hardly a pretense at all. He was such
a child himself, in his gleeful delight over the possession of a son and a
daughter, that she felt for him, tenderly, mistily, luminously, the very
emotion she was trying to capture for them—felt like cradling his head in
her weak arms, kissing him, crying over him a little.
She wouldn't have been allowed to do that to the babies anyway. They
were going to be terribly well brought up, those twins; that was apparent
from the beginning. They had two nurses all to themselves, quite apart from
Miss Harris, who looked after Rose: one uncannily infallible person,
omniscient in baby lore—thoroughgoing, logical, efficient, remorseless as a
German staff officer; and a bright-eyed, snub-nosed, smart little maid, for
an assistant, who boiled bottles, washed clothes, and, at certain stated hours,
over a previously determined route, at a given number of miles per hour,
wheeled the twins out, in a duplex perambulator, which Harriet had
acquired as soon as the need for it had become evident.
Miss Harris was to go away to another case at the end of the month. But
Mrs. Ruston (she was the staff officer) and Doris, the maid, were destined,
it appeared, to be as permanent as the babies. But Rose had the germ of an
idea of her own about that.
They got them named with very little difficulty. The boy was Rodney, of
course, after his father and grandfather before him. Rose was a little afraid
Rodney would want the girl named after her, and was relieved to find he
didn't. There'd never in the world be but one Rose for him, he said. So Rose
named the girl Portia.
They kept Rose in bed for three weeks; flat on her back as much as
possible, which was terribly irksome to her, since her strength and vitality

were coming back so fast. The irksomeness was added to by a horrible
harness largely of whalebone. Rose got the notion, too, that the purpose of
all this was not quite wholly hygienic. Harriet had said once: "You know the
most distinguished thing about you, Rose, dear—about your looks, I mean
—is that lovely boyish line of yours. It will be a perfect crime if you let
yourself spread out."
This wasn't the sort of consideration to make the inactivity any easier to
endure. She might have rebelled, had it not been for that germinant idea of
hers. It wouldn't do, she saw, in the light of that, to give them any excuse
for calling her unreasonable.
At the end of this purgatorial three weeks, she was carried to a chair and
allowed to sit up a little, and by the end of another, to walk about—just a
few steps at a time of course. One Sunday morning, Rodney carried her up-
stairs to the nursery to see her babies bathed. This was a big room at the top
of the house which Florence McCrea had always vaguely intended to make
into a studio. But, in a paralysis of indecision as to what sort of studio to
make it (book-binding, pottery and art weaving called her about equally)
she had left the thing bare.
Rodney had given Harriet carte blanche to go ahead and fit it up before
he and Rose came back from the seashore, and the layette was a monument
to Harriet's thoroughgoing practicality. There had been a wild day of
supplementing of course, when it was discovered that there were two babies
instead of one.
The room, when they escorted Rose into it, was a terribly impressive
place. The spirit of a barren sterile efficiency brooded everywhere. And this
appearance of barrenness obtained despite the presence of an enormous
number of articles; a pair of scales, a perfect battery of electric heaters of
various sorts; rows of vacuum jars for keeping things cold or hot; a small
sterilizing oven; instruments and appliances that Rose couldn't guess the
uses or the names of. Mrs. Ruston, of course, was master of them all, and
Doris flew about to do her bidding, under a watchful and slightly suspicious
eye. (Doris was the sort of looking girl who might be suspected of kissing a
tiny pink hand when no one was looking.)

Rose surveyed this scene, just as she would have surveyed a laboratory,
or a factory where they make something complicated, like watches. That's
what it was, really. Those two pink little objects, in their two severely
sanitary baskets, were factory products. At precise and unalterable intervals,
a highly scientific compound of fats and proteids was put into them. They
were inspected, weighed, submitted to a routine of other processes. And in
all the routine, there was nothing that their mother, now they were fairly
born, was wanted for. Indispensable to a certain point, no doubt. But after
that rather the other way about—an obstacle to the routine instead of a part
of it.
Rose kept these ideas to herself and kept her eye on young Doris; listened
to the orders she got; and studied alertly what she did in the execution of
them.
Rodney had a lovely time watching the twins bathed. He stood about in
everybody's way, made what he conceived to be alluring noises, in the
perfectly unsuccessful attempt to attract the infants' attention, and finally,
when the various processes were complete, on schedule, like a limited train,
and the thermometrically correct bottles of food were ready, one for each
baby, he turned suddenly to his wife and said: "Don't you want to—hold
them, Rose?" She'd have held a couple of glowing brands in her arms for
him, the way he had looked and the way he had said it.
A stab of pain went through her and tears came up into her eyes. "Yes,
give them to me," she started to say.
But Mrs. Ruston spoke before she could frame the words. It was their
feeding hour, she pointed out; a bad time for them to be excited, and the
bottles were heated exactly right.
By that time Rose's idea had flowered into resolution. She knew exactly
what she was going to do. But she mustn't jeopardize the success of her plan
by trying to put it into effect too soon.
She waited patiently, reasonably, for another fortnight. Harriet by that
time had gone off to Washington on a visit, taking Rodney's heartfelt thanks
with her. Rose expressed hers just as warmly, and felt ashamed that they

were so unreal. She simply mustn't let herself get to resenting Harriet! At
the end of the fortnight, the doctor made his final visit. Rose had especially
asked Rodney to be on hand to hear his report when the examination was
over. Rose and the doctor found him waiting in the library.
"He says," Rose told her husband, "that I'm perfectly well." She turned to
the doctor for confirmation, "Don't you?"
The doctor smiled. "As far as my diagnostic resources go, Mrs. Aldrich,
you are perfectly well."
Rodney was pleased of course, and expressed this feeling fervently. But
he looked across at his glowing radiant wife, with a touch of misgiving.
"What are you trying to put over on me?" he asked.
"Not a thing," said Rose demurely. "I thought you'd be glad to know that I
needn't be kept in cotton-wool any more, and that you'd feel surer of it if he
told you."
"I feel surer that you've got something up your sleeve," he said. And, to
the doctor: "I don't imagine that in saying my wife is perfectly well, you
mean to suggest an absence of all reasonable caution."
The doctor took the hint, expatiated largely; it was always well to be
careful—one couldn't, in fact, be too careful. The human body at best, more
especially the—ah—feminine human body, was a delicate machine, not to
be abused without inviting serious consequences. He was even a little
reproachful about it.
"But there's no more reason, is there," Rose persisted, "why I should be
careful than why any other woman should—my nurse-maid for example? Is
she any healthier than I am?"
It was indiscreet of the doctor to look at her before he answered. Her eyes
were sparkling, the color bright in her cheeks; unconsciously, she had
flattened her shoulders back and drawn a good deep breath down into her
lungs. The doctor smiled a smile of surrender and turned back to Rodney.

"I'll confess," he said, "that in my experience, Mrs. Aldrich is almost a lusus
naturae—a perfectly sound, healthy woman."
Rose smiled widely and contentedly on the pair of them. "That's more
like it," she said to the doctor. "Thanks very much."
But after he had gone, she did not spring anything on Rodney, as he fully
expected she would. She took him out for a tramp through the park in the
dusk of a perfect autumn afternoon, and went to a musical show with him in
the evening. She might have been, as far as he could see, the Rose of a year
ago. She had the same lithe boyish swing. She even wore, though he didn't
know it, the same skirt for their walk in the park that she had worn on some
of their tramps before they were married. And when they had had their
evening at the theater, and a bite of supper somewhere, and come home, she
let him drop off to sleep without a word that would explain her insistence
on getting a clean bill of health from the doctor.
But the next morning, while Doris was busy in the laundry, she found
Mrs. Ruston in the nursery and had a talk with that lady, which was
destined to produce seismic upheavals.
"I've decided to make a little change in our arrangements, Mrs. Ruston,"
she said. "But I don't think it's one that will disturb you very much. I'm
going to let Doris go—I'll get her another place, of course—and do her
work myself."
Mrs. Ruston compressed her lips, and went on for a minute with what she
was doing to one of the twins, as if she hadn't heard.
"Doris is quite satisfactory, madam," she said at last. "I'd not advise
making a change. She's a dependable young woman, as such go. Of course I
watch her very close."
"I think I can promise to be dependable," Rose said. "I don't know much
about babies, of course, but I think I can learn as well as Doris. Anyhow, I
can wheel them about and wash their clothes and boil bottles and things as
well as she does. For the rest, you can tell me what to do just as you tell
her."

Mrs. Ruston took a considerably longer interval to digest this reply.
"Then you're meaning to give the girl her notice at once, madam?" she
asked.
"I'm not going to give her notice at all," said Rose. "I'm going to find her
another place. I shan't have any trouble about it though. As you say, she's a
very good nurse-maid, and she's a pleasant sort of a human being besides.
But as soon as I can find her another place, I'm going to take over her
work."
To this last observation it became evident that Mrs. Ruston meant to
make no reply at all. She gave Rose some statistical information about the
twins instead, in which Rose showed herself politely interested and
presently withdrew.
It soon appeared, however, that though Mrs. Ruston might be slow and
sparing of speech, she was capable of acting with a positively Napoleonic
dash. Rodney wore a queer expression all through dinner, and when he got
Rose alone in the library afterward, he explained it. Mrs. Ruston had made
her two-hour constitutional that afternoon into an opportunity for calling on
him at his office. She had given him notice, contingently. She made it an
inviolable rule of conduct, it appeared, never to undertake the care of two
infants without the assistance of a nurse-maid. She was a conscientious
person and she felt she couldn't do justice to her work on any other basis.
Rose had informed her of her intention to dispense with the services of the
nurse-maid, without engaging any one else to take her place. If Rose
adhered to this intention, Mrs. Ruston must leave.
It was some sort of absurd misunderstanding, of course, Rodney
concluded and wanted to know what it was all about.
"I did say I meant to let Doris go," Rose explained, "but I told her I meant
to take Doris' job myself. I said I thought I could be just as good a nurse-
maid as she was. I said I'd boil bottles and wash clothes and take Mrs.
Ruston's orders exactly as if I were being paid six dollars a week and board
for doing it. And I meant it just as literally as I said it."

He was prowling about the room in a worried sort of way, before she got
as far as that.
"I don't see, child," he exclaimed, "why you couldn't leave well enough
alone! If it's that old economy bug of yours again, it's nonsense. You'd save,
including board, about ten dollars a week. And it would work out one of
two ways: If you didn't do all the maid's work. Mrs. Ruston would have a
real grievance. She's right about needing all the help she gets. If you did do
it, it would mean that you'd work yourself sick.—Oh, I know what the
doctor said, but that's all rot, and he knew it. You had him hypnotized. You'd
have to give up everything for it—all your social duties, all our larks
together. Oh, it's absurd! You, to spend all your time doing menial work—
scrubbing and washing bottles, to save me ten dollars a week!"
"It isn't menial work," Rose insisted. "It's—apprentice work. After I've
been at it six months, learning as fast as I can, I'll be able to let Mrs. Ruston
go and take her job. I'll be really competent to take care of my own
children. I don't pretend I am now."
"I don't see why you can't do that as things are now. She'll let you practise
bathing them and things like that, and certainly no one would object to your
wheeling them out in the pram. But the nurse-maid would be on hand in
case ..."
"I'm to take it on then," said Rose, and her voice had a new ring in it—the
ring of scornful anger—"I'm to take it on as a sort of polite sentimental
amusement. I'm not to do any real work for them that depends on me to get
done. I'm not to be able to feel that, even in a bottle-washing sort of way,
I'm doing an indispensable service for them. They're not to need me for
anything, the poor little mites! They're to be something for me to have a sort
of emotional splurge with, just as"—she laughed raggedly—"just as some
of the wives you're so fond of talking about, are to their husbands."
He stared at her in perfectly honest bewilderment. He'd never seen her
like this before.
"You're talking rather wild I think, Rose," he said very quietly.

"I'm talking what I've learned from you," she said, but she did get her
voice in control again. "You've taught me the difference between real work,
and the painless imitation of it that a lot of us women spend our lives on—
between doing something because it's got to be done and is up to you, and
—finding something to do to spend the time.
"Oh, Rodney, please try to forget that I'm your wife and that you're in
love with me. Can't you just say: `Here's A, or B, or X, a perfectly healthy
woman, twenty-two years old, and a little real work would be good for
her'?"
She won, with much pleading, a sort of troubled half-assent from him.
The matter might be borne in mind. It could be taken up again with Mrs.
Ruston.
But Mrs. Ruston was adamant. Under no conceivable circumstances
could she consent to regard her employer's wife as a substitute for her own
hired assistant. There were other nurses though, to be got. Somewhere one
could be found, no doubt, who'd take a broader view.
Given a fair field, Rose might have won a victory here. But, as Portia had
said once, the pattern was cut differently. There was a sudden alarm one
night, when her little namesake was found strangling with the croup. There
were seven terrifying hours—almost unendurable hours, while the young
life swung and balanced over the ultimate abyss. The heroine of those hours
was Mrs. Ruston. It was her watchfulness that had been accessible to the
first alarm—her instant doing of the one right thing that stemmed the first
onrush. That the child lived was clearly creditable to her.
Rose made another effort even after that, though she knew she was beaten
in advance. She waited until the storm had subsided, until the old calm
routine was reestablished. Then, once more, she asked for her chance.
But Rodney exploded before she got the words fairly out of her mouth.
"No," he shouted, "I won't consider it! She's saved that baby's life.
Another woman might have, but it's more likely not. You'll have to find
some way of satisfying your whims that won't jeopardize those babies'

lives. After that night—good God, Rose, have you forgotten that night?—
I'm going to play it safe."
Rose paled a little and sat ivory still in her chair. There were no miracles
any more. The great dam was swept away.

CHAPTER XV

THE ONLY REMEDY

The sudden flaw of passion that had troubled the waters of Rodney's soul,
subsided, spent itself in mutterings, explanations, tending to become at last
rather apologetic. He said he didn't know why her request had got him like
that. It had seemed to him for a moment as if she didn't realize what the
children's lives meant to them—almost as if she didn't love them. He knew
that was absurd, of course.
Her own rather monstrous comments on these observations had luckily
remained unspoken. What if she did lose a child as a result of her effort to
care for it herself? She could bear more children. And what chance had she
to love them? Where was the soil for love to take root in, unless she took
care of them herself? These weren't really thoughts of hers—just a sort of
crooked reflection of what he was saying off the surface of a mind terribly
preoccupied with something else.
She was in the grip of an appalling realization. This moment—this
actually present moment that was going to last only until she should speak
for the next time, or move her eyes around to his face—was the critical
moment of her life. She had, for just this moment, a choice of two things to
say when next she should speak—a choice of two ways of looking into his

face. A mountaineer, standing on the edge of a crevasse, deciding whether
to try to leap across and win a precarious way to the summit, or to turn back
and confess the climb has been in vain, is confronted by a choice like that.
If ever the leap was to be made, it must be made now. The rainbow bridge
across the crevasse, the miracle of motherhood, had faded like the mist it
was composed of.
She was a mother now. Yet her relation to her husband's life was the same
as that of the girl who had gone to his office the night of the Randolphs'
dinner. And no external event—nothing that could happen to her (remember
that even motherhood had "happened" in her case) could ever transmute
that relation into the thing she wanted. If the alchemy were to be wrought at
all, it would be by the act of her own will—at the cost of a deliberately
assumed struggle. There was nothing, any more, to hope from waiting. The
thing that whispered, "Wait! To-morrow—some to-morrow or other, it may
be easier! Wait until, for yourself, you've thought out the consequences,"—
that was the voice of cowardice. If she turned back, down the easier path,
to-night, it must be under no delusion that she'd ever try to climb again, or
find a pair of magic wings that would carry her, effortless, to what she
wanted.
Well, then, she had her choice. One of two things she might do now. It
was in her power to look up at him and smile, and say: "All right, Roddy,
old man, I'll stop being disagreeable. I won't have any more whims." And
she could go to him and clasp her hands behind his head and feel the rough
pressure of his cheeks against the velvety surfaces of her forearms, and kiss
his eyes and mouth; surrender to the embrace she knew so well would
follow.
She could make, after a fashion, a life of that. She had no fear but it
would last. Barring incalculable misfortunes, she ought to be able to keep
her looks and her charm for him, unimpaired, or but little impaired, for
twenty years—twenty-five, with care. For the rich, the resources of modern
civilization would almost guarantee that. Well, twenty-five years would see
Rodney through his fifties. She needn't, barring accident, have any more
children. He'd probably be content with two; especially as they were boy
and girl.

The other man in him—the man who wasn't her lover—would struggle of
course. Except when she was by, the lover would probably have a bad time
of it. She'd have to find some amusing sort of occupation to enable her to
forget that. But when she was there, it would be strange if she and her lover
together couldn't, most of the time, keep the other man locked up where he
wouldn't disturb them much.
Lived without remorse or misgivings, played magnificently for all it was
worth, as she could play it—she knew that now—it would be a rather
wonderful life. They must be decidedly an exceptional pair of lovers, she
thought. Certainly Madame Gréville's generalization about Americans did
not apply to them, and she was coming to suspect it did apply to the
majority of her friends. She could have that life—safely, surely, as far as our
poor mortality can be sure of anything. She had only to reach out her hands.
But if, instead, she took the leap ...!
"Roddy ..." she said.
He was slumped down in a big easy chair at the other side of the table,
swinging a restless foot; drumming now and then with his fingers. It was
many silent minutes since the storm of reproach with which he had repelled
her plea for a part in the actual responsible care of her children had died
away. He had spoken with unnecessary vehemence, he knew. He had
admitted that—said he was sorry, as well as he could without withdrawing
from his position. But he had been met by that most formidable of all
weapons—a blank silence—an inscrutable face. Some sort of scene was
inevitable, he knew. And he sat there waiting for it. She had been hurt. She
was undoubtedly very angry.
He thought he was ready for anything. But just the way she spoke his
name, startled—almost frightened—him, she said it so quietly, so—
tenderly.
"Roddy," she said, "I want you to come over here and kiss me, and then
go back and sit down in that chair again."

He went a little pale at that. The swing of his foot was arrested suddenly.
But, for a moment, he made no move—just looked wonderingly into her
great grave eyes.
"Something's going to happen," she went on, "and before it's over, I'm
afraid it's going to hurt you terribly—and me. And I want the kiss for us to
remember. So that we'll always know, whatever happens afterward, that we
loved each other." She held out her arms to him. "Won't you come?"
He came—a man bewildered—bent down over her and found her lips;
but almost absently, out of a daze.
"No, not like that," she murmured. "In the old way."
There was a long embrace.
"I wouldn't do it," she said, "I don't believe I'd have the courage to do it,
if it were just me. But there's some one else—I've made some one a
promise. I can't tell you about that. Now please go back and sit over there
where you were, where we can talk quietly.—Oh, Roddy, I love you so!—
No, please go back, old man! And—and light your pipe. Oh, don't tremble
like that! It—it isn't a tragedy. It's—for us, it's the greatest hope in the
world."
He went back to his chair. He even lighted his pipe as she asked him to,
and waited as steadily as he could for her to begin.
But she couldn't begin while she looked at him. She moved a little closer
to the table and leaned her elbow on it, shaded her eyes with one hand,
while the other played with the stump of a pencil that happened to be lying
there.
"Do you remember ..." she began, and it was wonderful how quiet and
steady her voice was. There was even the trace of a smile about her
wonderful mouth. "Do you remember that afternoon of ours, the very first
of them, when you brought home my note-books and found me asleep on
the couch in our old back parlor? Do you remember how you told me that
one's desires were the only motive power he had? One couldn't ride
anywhere, you said, except on the backs of his own passions? Well, it was a

funny thing—I got to wondering afterward what my desires were, and it
seemed I hadn't any. Everything had, somehow, come to me before I knew I
wanted it. Everything in the world, even your love for me, came like that.
"But I've got a passion now, Rodney. I've had it for a long while. It's a
desire I can't satisfy. The thing I want, and there's nothing in the world that I
wouldn't give to get it, is—well, your friendship; that's a way of saying it."
What he had been waiting to hear, of course, she didn't know. But she
knew by the way he started and stared at her, that it hadn't been for that. The
thing struck him, it seemed, as a sort of grotesquely irritating anti-climax.
"Gracious Heaven!" he said. "My friendship! Why, I'm in love with you!
That's certainly a bigger thing. Go back to your geometry, child. The greater
includes the less, doesn't it?"
"I don't know whether it's a bigger thing or not," she said. "But it doesn't
include the other. Love's just a sort of miracle thing that happens to you.
You don't have it because you deserve it. The person I made that promise to
would have earned it, if any one could. But it doesn't come that way. It's
like lightning. It strikes or else it doesn't. Well, it struck us. But friendship
—there's this about it. You can't get it any way in the world, except just by
earning it. Nobody can give it to you, no matter how hard he tries. So when
you've got it, you can always say, 'There's something that I'm entitled to—
something that's mine.' Your love isn't mine any more than the air is. I never
did anything to earn it.
"And that's why it can't satisfy me.—Because it doesn't, Roddy. It hasn't
for ever so long. It's something wonderful that's—happened to me. It's the
loveliest thing that ever happened to anybody. And just because it's so
wonderful and beautiful, I can't bear to—well, this is hard to say—I can't
bear to use it to live on. I can't bear to have it mixed up in things like
millinery bills and housekeeping expense. I can't bear to see it become a
thing that piles a load of hateful obligations on your back. I could live on
your friendship, Roddy; because your friendship would mean that somehow
I was earning my way, but I can't live on your love; any more than you

could on mine. Won't you—won't you just try to think for a moment what
that would mean to you?"
Now that he had sensed the direction her talk was headed in, even though
he hadn't even vaguely glimpsed the point at which she was going to bring
up, he made it much harder for her to talk to him. He was tramping up and
down the room, stopping and turning short every now and then with a
gesture of exasperation, or an interruption that never got beyond two or
three words and broke off always in a sort of frantic speechlessness.
She knew he couldn't help it. Down underneath his mind, controlling
utterly its processes, was a ganglion of instincts that were utterly outraged
by the things she was saying to him. It was they and not his intelligence she
had to fight. She must be patient, as gentle as she could, but she must make
him listen.
"You've got my friendship!" he cried out now. "It's a grotesque perversion
of the facts to say you haven't."
She smiled at him as she shook her head. "I've spent too many months
trying to get it and seeing myself fail—oh, so ridiculously!—not to know
what I am talking about, Roddy."
And then, still smiling, rather sadly, she told what some of the
experiments had been—some of her attempts to break into the life he kept
locked away from her and carry off a share of it for herself.
"I was angry at first when I found you keeping me out," she said, "angry
and hurt. I used to cry about it. And then I saw it wasn't your fault. That's
how I discovered friendship had to be earned."
But her power to maintain that attitude of grave detachment was about
spent. The passion mounted in her voice and in her eyes as she went on.
"You thought it was because of my condition, as you called it, that my
mind had got full of wild ideas;—the wild idea that I wasn't really and truly
your wife at all, but only your mistress, and that I was pulling you down
from something free and fine that you had been, to something that you
despised yourself for being and had to try to deny you were. Those were the

obsessions of a pregnant woman, you thought—something she was to be
soothed and coddled into forgetting. You were wrong about that, Roddy.
"I did have an obsession, but it wasn't the thing you thought. It was an
obsession that kept me quiet, and contented and happy, and willing to wait
in spite of everything. The obsession was that none of those things mattered
because a big miracle was coming that was going to change it all. I was
going to have a job at last—a job that was just as real as yours—the job of
being a mother."
Her voice broke in a fierce sharp little laugh over the word, but she got it
back in control again.
"I was going to have a baby to feed out of my own body, to keep alive
with my own care. There was going to be responsibility and hard work,
things that demanded courage and endurance and sacrifice. I could earn
your friendship with that, I said. That was the real obsession, Roddy, and it
never really died until to-night. Because of course I have kept on hoping,
even after I might have seen how it was. But the babies' lives aren't to be
jeopardized to gratify my whims. Well, I suppose I can't complain. It's over,
that's the main thing.
"And now, here I am perfectly normal and well again—as good as ever.
I've kept my looks—oh, my hair and my complexion and my figure. I could
wear pretty clothes again and start going out to things now that the season's
begun, just as I did a year ago. People would admire me, and you'd be
pleased, and you'd love me as much as ever, and it would all be like the
paradise it was last year, except for one thing. The one thing is that if I do
that, I'll know this time what I really am. Your mistress, Roddy; your legal,
perfectly respectable mistress,—and a little more despicable rather than
less, I think, because of the adjectives."
"I've let that word go by once," he said quietly, but with a dangerous light
of anger in his eyes. "I won't again. It's perfectly outrageous and
inexcusable that you should talk like that, and I'll ask you never to do it
again."

"I won't," she flashed back at him, "if you'll explain why I'm not exactly
what I say." And after ten seconds of silence, she went on.
"Why, Roddy, I've heard you describe me a hundred times. Not the you
that's my lover. The other you; talking all over the universe to Barry Lake.
You've described the woman who's never been trained nor taught nor
disciplined; who's been brought up soft, with the bloom on, for the purpose
of making her marriageable; who's never found her job in marriage, who
doesn't cook, nor sew, nor spin, nor even take care of her own children; the
woman who uses her sex charm to save her from having to do hard ugly
things, and keep her in luxury. Do you remember what you've called her,
Roddy? Do you remember the word you've used? I've used a gentler word
than that.
"Oh, you didn't know, you poor blind boy, that I was the woman you were
talking about. You never saw it at all. But I am. I was brought up like that.
—Oh, not on purpose. Dear old mother! She wasn't trying to make me into
a prostitute any more then you are trying to make me into your mistress.
You both love me, that's all. It's just an instinct not to let anything hurt me,
nor frighten me, nor tire me, nor teach me what work is. She thought she
was educating me to be a lawyer so that when the time came, I could be one
of the leaders of the woman movement just as she'd been. And all the while,
without knowing it, she was educating me to be the sort of person you'd fall
in love with—something precious and expensive—something to be taken
care of.
"I didn't understand any of that when you married me, Roddy; it was just
like a dream to me—like a fairy story come true. If any one had told me a
year ago, that I should ever be anything but perfectly happy in your love for
me, I'd have laughed at him. I remember telling Madame Gréville that our
marriage had turned out well—ended happily. And she did laugh. That was
before I'd begun to understand. But I do understand now. I know why it was
you could talk to me, back in those days before we were married, about
anything under the sun—things ten thousand miles above my head; what it
was that fooled me into thinking we were friends as well as lovers. I know
why you've never been able to talk to me like that since. And I know—this
is the worst of all, Roddy,—this is the piece of knowledge that makes it

impossible—I know what a good mistress I could make. I know I could
make you love me whether you wanted to or not; whether I loved you or
not. I could make other men love me, if I could make up my mind to do it—
make them tell me all their hopes and dreams, and think I had a fine mind
and a wonderful understanding. Oh, it's too easy—it's too hatefully easy!
"Do you know why I told you that? Because if you believe it and
understand it, you will see why I can't go on living on your love. Because
how can you be sure, knowing that my position in the world, my friends—
oh, the very clothes on my back, and the roof over my head, are dependent
on your love,—how are you going to be sure that my love for you is honest
and disinterested? What's to keep you from wondering—asking questions?
Love's got to be free, Roddy. The only way to make it free is to have
friendship growing alongside it. So, when I can be your partner and your
friend, I'll be your mistress, too. But not—not again, Roddy, till I can find a
way. I'll have to find it for myself. I'll have to go...."
She broke down there over a word she couldn't at first say, buried her
face in her arms and let a deep racking sob or two have their own way with
her. But presently she sat erect again and, with a supreme effort of will,
forced her voice to utter the word.
"I've got to go somewhere alone—away from you, and stay until I find it.
If I ever do, and you want me, I'll come back."

CHAPTER XVI

ROSE OPENS THE DOOR

The struggle between them lasted a week—a ghastly week, during which,
as far as the surface of things showed, their life flowed along in its
accustomed channels. It was a little worse than that, really, because the
week included, so an ironic Fate had decreed, Thanksgiving Day and a jolly
family party at Frederica's, with congratulations on the past, plans for the
future. And Rose and Rodney, as civilized persons will do, kept their faces,
accepted congratulations, made gay plans for the twins; smiled or laughed
when necessary—somehow or other, got through with it.
But at all sorts of times, and in all sorts of places when they were alone
together, the great battle was renewed; mostly through the dead hours of the
night, in Rose's bedroom, she sitting up in bed, he tramping up and down,
shivering and shuddering in a big bath-robe. It had a horrible way of
interrupting itself for small domestic commonplaces, which in their
assumption of the permanency of their old life, their blind disregard of the
impending disaster, had an almost unendurable poignancy. A breakfast on
the morning of an execution is something like that.
The hardest thing about it all for Rose—the thing that came nearest to
breaking down her courage—was to see how slowly Rodney came to
realize it at all. He was like a trapped animal pacing the four sides of his
cage confident that in a moment or two he would find the way out, and
then, incredulously, dazedly, coming to the surmise that there was no way
out. She really meant to go away and leave him—leave the babies; go
somewhere where his care and protection could not reach her! She was

actually planning to do it—planning the details of doing it! By the end of
one of their long talks, it would seem to her he had grasped this monstrous
intention and accepted it. But before the beginning of the next one, he
seemed to manage somehow to dismiss the thing as an impossible
nightmare.
An invitation came in from the Crawfords for a dance at the Blackstone,
the fifth of December, and he said something about accepting it.
"I shan't be here then, Roddy, you know," she said.
He went completely to pieces at that, as if the notion of her going away
had never really reached his mind before.
The struggle ranged through the widest possible gamut of moods. They
had their moments of rapturous love—passionate attempts at self-surrender.
They had long hours of cool discussion, as impersonal as if they had been
talking about the characters out of a hook instead of about themselves. They
had stormy nerve-tearing hours of blind agonizing, around and around in
circles, lacerating each other, lashing out at each other, getting nowhere.
They had moments of incandescent anger.
He tried, just once, early in the fight, to take the ground he had taken
once before; that she was irresponsible, obsessed. There was a fracture
somewhere, as James Randolph's jargon had it, in her unconscious mind.
She didn't let him go far with that. He saw her blaze up in a splendid burst
of wrath, as she had blazed once—oh, an eternity ago, at a street-car
conductor. Her challenge rang like a sword out of a scabbard.
"We'll settle that before we go any further," she said. "Telephone for
James Randolph, or any other alienist you like. Let him take me and put me
in a sanatorium somewhere and keep me under observation as long as he
pleases, until he's satisfied whether I'm out of my mind or not. But unless
you're willing to do that, don't call me irresponsible."
He grew more reasonable as a belief in her complete seriousness and
determination sobered him. He made desperate efforts to recover his self-
control—to get his big, cool, fine mechanism of a mind into action. But his

mind, to his complete bewilderment, betrayed him. He'd always looked at
Rose before, through the lens of his emotions. But now that he forced
himself to look at her through the non-refracting window from which he
looked at the rest of the world, she compelled him again and again to admit
that she was right.
"Why shouldn't I be right?" she said with a woebegone smile. "These are
all just things I've learned from you."
After a long and rather angry struggle with himself, he made up his mind
to a compromise, and in one of their cooler talks together, he offered it.
"We've both of us pretty well lost our sense of proportion, it seems to
me," he said. "This whole ghastly business started from my refusing to let
Mrs. Ruston go and get a nurse who'd allow you to be your own nurse-
maid. Well, I'm willing to give up completely on that point. You can let
Mrs. Ruston go as soon as you like and get a nurse who'll meet with your
ideas."
"You're doing that," said Rose thoughtfully, "rather than let me go away.
That's the way it is, isn't it?"
"Why, yes, of course," he admitted. "I was looking at things from the
children's point of view, and I thought I was right. From their point of view,
I still think so."
She drew in a long sigh and shook her head. "It won't do, Roddy. Can't
you see you're giving way practically under a threat—because I'll go away
if you don't? But think what it would mean if I did stay, on those terms. The
thing would rankle always. And if anything did happen to one of the babies
because the new nurse wasn't quite so good, you'd never forgive me—not in
all the world.
"And," she added a little later, "that would be just as true of any other
compromise. I mean like going and living in a flat and letting me do the
housework—any of the things we've talked about. I can say I am going
away, don't you see, but I couldn't say I'd go away—unless ... I couldn't use

that threat to extort things from you without killing our whole life dead.
Can't you see that?"
His mind infuriated him by agreeing with her—goaded him into another
passionate outburst during which he accused her of bad faith, of being tired
of him, anxious to get away from him—seizing pretexts. But he offered no
more compromises. The thing he fell back on after that was a plea for delay.
The question must be decided coolly; not like this. Let them just put it out
of their minds for a while, go on with the old routine as if nothing
threatened it and see if things didn't work somewhat better—see if they
weren't, after all, better friends than she thought.
"If I were ill, Roddy," she said, "and there was an operation talked about;
if they said to you that there was something I might drag along for years,
half alive, without, but that if I had it, it would either kill or cure, you
wouldn't urge delay. We'd decide for or against it and be done. It's—it's
taking just all the courage I've got to face this thing now that I am excited—
now that I've thought it out and talked it out with you—now that I've got the
big hope before my eyes. But to wait until I was tangled in the old routine
and the babies began to get a little older and more—human, so that they
knew me, and then do it in cold blood! I couldn't do that. We'd patch up
some sort of a life, pretending a little, quarreling a little, and when my
feelings got especially hurt about something, I'd try to make myself think,
and you, that I was going away. And we'd both know down inside that we
were cowards."
He protested against the word, but she stuck to it.
"We're both afraid now," she insisted. "That's one of the things that makes
us so cruel to each other when we talk—fear. The world's a terrible place to
me, Roddy. I've never ventured out alone in it; not a step. A year ago, I don't
think I'd have been so frightened. I didn't know then—I'd never really
thought about it—what a hard dangerous thing it is, just to earn enough to
keep yourself alive. I haven't any illusions now that it's easy—not after the
things I've heard Barry Lake tell about. But sometimes I think you're more
afraid than I; and that you've got a more intolerable thing to fear—ridicule
—an intangible sort of pitying ridicule that you can't get hold of; guessing

at the sort of things people will say and never really quite knowing. And we
have each got the other's fear to suffer under, too.—Oh, Roddy, Roddy,
don't hate me too bitterly ...! But I think if we can both endure it, stand the
gaff, as you said once, and know that the other's standing it, too, perhaps
that'll be the real beginning of the new life."
Somehow or other, during their calmer moments toward the end, practical
details managed to get talked about—settled after a fashion, without the
admission really being made on his part that the thing was going to happen
at all.
"I'd do everything I could of course, to make it easier," she said. "We
could have a story for people that I'd gone to California to make mother a
long visit. You could bring Harriet home from Washington to keep house
while I was gone. I'd take my trunks, you see, and really go. People would
suspect of course, after a while, but they'll always pretend to believe
anything that's comfortable—anything that saves scenes and shocks and
explanations."
"Where would you go, really?" he demanded. "Have you any plan at all?"
"I have a sort of plan," she said. "I think I know of a way of earning a
living."
But she didn't offer to go on and tell him what it was, and after a little
silence, he commented bitterly on this omission.
"You won't even give me the poor satisfaction of knowing what you're
doing," he said.
"I'd love to," she said, "—to be able to write to you, hear from you every
day. But I don't believe you want to know. I think it would be too hard for
you. Because you'd have to promise not to try to get me back—not to come
and rescue me if I got into trouble and things went badly and I didn't know
where to turn. Could you promise that, Roddy?"
He gave a groan and buried his face in his hands. Then:

"No," he said furiously. "Of course I couldn't. See you suffering and stand
by with my hands in my pockets and watch!" He sprang up and seized her
by the arms in a grip that actually left bruises, and fairly shook her in the
agony of his entreaty. "Tell me it's a nightmare, Rose," he said. "Tell me it
isn't true. Wake me up out of it!"
But under the indomitable resolution of her blue eyes, he turned away.
This was the last appeal of that sort that he made.
"I'll promise," she said presently, "to be sensible—not to take any risks I
don't have to take. I'll regard my life and my health and all, as something
I'm keeping in trust for you. I'll take plenty of warm sensible clothes when I
go; lots of shoes and stockings—things like that, and if you'll let me, I'll—
I'll borrow a hundred dollars to start myself off with. It isn't a tragedy,
Roddy,—not that part of it. You wouldn't be afraid for any one else as big
and strong and healthy as I."
Gradually, out of the welter of scenes like that, the thing got itself
recognized as something that was to happen. But the parting came at last in
a little different way from any they had foreseen.
Rodney came home from his office early one afternoon, with a telegram
that summoned him to New York to a conference of counsel in a big public
utility case he had been working on for months. He must leave, if he were
going at all, at five o'clock. He ransacked the house, vainly at first, for
Rose, and found her at last in the trunk-room—dusty, disheveled, sobbing
quietly over something she held hugged in her arms. But she dried her eyes
and came over to him and asked what it was that had brought him home so
early.
He showed her the telegram. "I'll have to leave in an hour," he said, "if
I'm to go."
She paled at that, and sat down rather giddily on a trunk. "You must go,"
she said, "of course. And—Roddy, I guess that'll be the easiest way. I'll get
my telegram to-night—pretend to get it—from Portia. And you can give me
the hundred dollars, and then, when you come back, I'll be gone."

The thing she had been holding in her hands slipped to the floor. He
stooped and picked it up—stared at it with a sort of half awakened
recognition.
"I f—found it," she explained, "among some old things Portia sent over
when she moved. Do you know what it is? It's one of the note-books that
got wet—that first night when we were put off the street-car. And—and,
Roddy, look!"
She opened it to an almost blank page, and with a weak little laugh,
pointed to the thing that was written there:
"'March fifteenth, nineteen twelve!' Your birthday, you see, and the day
we met each other."
And then, down below, the only note she had made during the whole of
that lecture, he read: "Never marry a man with a passion for principles."
"That's the trouble with us, you see," she said. "If you were just an
ordinary man without any big passions or anything, it wouldn't matter much
if your life got spoiled. But with us, we've got to try for the biggest thing
there is. Oh, Roddy, Roddy, darling! Hold me tight for just a minute, and
then I'll come and help you pack."

BOOK THREE

The World Alone

CHAPTER I

THE LENGTH OF A THOUSAND YARDS

"Here's the first week's rent then," said Rose, handing the landlady three
dollars, "and I think you'd better give me a receipt showing till when it's
paid for. Do you know where there's an expressman who would go for a
trunk?"
The landlady had tight gray hair, a hard bitten hatchet face, and a back
that curved through a forty-degree arc between the lumbar and the cervical
vertebræ, a curve which was accentuated by the faded longitudinal blue and
white stripes—like ticking—of the dress she wore. She had no charms, one
would have said, of person, mind or manner. But it was nevertheless true
that Rose was renting this room largely on the strength of the landlady. She
was so much more humanly possible than any of the others at whose
placarded doors Rose had knocked or rung ...!
For the last year and a half, anyway since she had married Rodney
Aldrich, the surface that life had presented to her had been as bland as
velvet. She'd never been spoken to by anybody except in terms of
politeness. All the people she encountered could be included under two
categories: her friends, if one stretches the word to include all her social
acquaintances, and, in an equally broad sense, her servants; that is to say,
people who earned their living by doing things she wanted done. Her
friends' and her servants' manners were not alike, to be sure, but as far as
intent went, they came to the same thing. They presented, whatever
passions, misfortunes, dislikes, uncomfortable facts of any sort might lie in
the background, a smooth and practically frictionless, bearing surface. A
person accustomed to that surface develops a soft skin. This was about the
first of Rose's discoveries.
To be looked at with undisguised suspicion—to have a door slammed in
her face as the negative answer to a civil question, left her at first

bewildered, and then enveloped in a blaze of indignation. It was perhaps
lucky for her that this happened at the very beginning of her pilgrimage.
Because, with that fire once alight within her, Rose could go through
anything. The horrible fawning, leering landlady whom she had
encountered later, might have turned her sick, but for that fine steady glow.
The hatchet-faced one she had finally arrived at, made no protestations of
her own respectability, and she seemed, though rather reluctantly, willing to
assume that of her prospective lodger. She was puzzled about something,
Rose could see; disposed to be very watchful and at no pains to conceal this
attitude.
Well, she'd probably learned that she had to watch, poor thing! And, for
that matter, Rose would probably have to do some watching on her own
account. And, if the fact was there, why bother to keep up a contradictory
fiction. So Rose asked for a receipt.
The matter of the trunk was easily disposed of. Rose had a check for it. It
was at the Polk Street Station. There was a cigar and news stand two blocks
down, the landlady said, where an expressman had his headquarters. There
was a blue sign out in front: "Schulz Express"; Rose couldn't miss it.
The landlady went away to write out a receipt. Rose closed the door after
her and locked it.
It was a purely symbolistic act. She wasn't going to change her clothes or
anything, and she didn't particularly want to keep anybody out. But, in a
sense in which it had never quite been true before, this was her room, a
room where any one lacking her specific invitation to enter, would be an
intruder—a condition that had not obtained either in her mother's house or
in Rodney's.
She smiled widely over the absurdity of indulging in a pleasurable feeling
of possession in a squalid little cubby-hole like this. The wall-paper was
stained and faded, the paint on the soft-wood floor worn through in streaks;
there was an iron bed—a double bed, painted light blue and lashed with
string where one of its joints showed a disposition to pull out. The mattress
on the bed was lumpy. There was a dingy-looking oak bureau with a rather

small but pretty good plate-glass mirror on it; a marble topped, black walnut
wash-stand; a pitcher of the plainest and cheapest white ware standing in a
bowl on top of it, and a highly ornate, hand-painted slop-jar—the sole
survivor, evidently, of a much prized set—under the lee of it. The steep
gable of the roof cut away most of one side of the room, though there would
be space for Rose's trunk to stand under it, and across the corner, at a
curiously distressing angle, hung an inadequate curtain that had five or six
clothes hooks behind it.
In the foreground of the view out of the window, was a large oblong
plateau—the flat roof of an extension which had casually been attached to
the front of the building and carried it forward to the sidewalk over what
had once been a small front yard. The extension had a plate-glass front and
was occupied, Rose had noticed before she plunged into the little tunnel that
ran alongside it and led to the main building, by a dealer in delicatessen.
Over the edge of the flat roof, she could see the top third of two endless
streams of trolley-cars, for the traffic in this street was heavy, by night, she
imagined, as well as by day.
The opposite façade of the street, like the one of which her own wall and
window formed a part, was highly irregular and utterly casual. There were
cheap two-story brick stores with false fronts that carried them up a half
story higher. There were little gable-ended cottages with their fronts hacked
out into show-windows. There were double houses of brick with stone
trimmings that once had had some residential pretensions. The one
characteristic that they possessed in common, was that of having been
designed, patently, for some purpose totally different from the one they now
served.
The shops on the street level had, for the most part, an air of shabby
prosperity. There was, within the space Rose's window commanded, a
cheap little tailor shop, the important part of whose business was advertised
by the sign "pressing done." There was a tobacconist's shop whose
unwashed windows revealed an array of large wooden buckets and dusty
lithographs; a shoe shop that did repairing neatly while you waited; a rather
fly-specked looking bakery. There was a saloon on the corner, and beside it,

a four-foot doorway with a painted transom over it that announced it as the
entrance of the Bellevue Hotel.
The signs on the second-story windows indicated dentist parlors, the
homes of mid-wives, ladies' tailors and dressmakers, and everywhere
furnished rooms for light housekeeping to let.
The people who patronized those shops, who drank their beer at the
corner saloon, who'd be coming hurriedly in the night to ring up the mid-
wife, who smoked the sort of tobacco that was sold from those big wooden
buckets; the people who lounged along the wide sidewalks, or came riding
down-town at seven in the morning, and back at six at night, packed so tight
that they couldn't get their arms up to hold by the straps in the big roaring
cars that kept that incessant procession going in the middle of the street—
they all inhabited, Rose realized, a world utterly different from the one she
had left. The distance between the hurrying life she looked out on through
her grimy window, and that which she had been wont to contemplate
through Florence McCrea's exquisitely leaded casements, was simply
planetary.
And yet, queerly enough, in terms of literal lineal measurement, the
distance between the windows themselves, was less than a thousand yards.
Less than ten minutes' walking from the mouth of the little tunnel alongside
the delicatessen shop, would take her back to her husband's door. She had,
in her flight out into the new world, doubled back on her trail. And, such is
the enormous social and spiritual distance between North Clark Street and
The Drive, she was as safely hidden here, as completely out of the orbit of
any of her friends, or even of her friends' servants, as she could have been
in New York or in San Francisco.
Having to come away furtively like this was a terrible countermine
beneath her courage. If only she could have had a flourish of defiant
trumpets to speed her on her way! But, done like that, the thing would have
hurt Rodney too intolerably. His intelligence might be twentieth century or
beyond. It might acquiesce in, or even enthusiastically advocate, a relation
between men and women that hadn't existed, anyway since the beginning of
the Christian Era; it might accept without faltering, all the corollaries

pendent to that relation. But his actuating instincts, his psychical reflexes,
stretched their roots away back to the Middle Ages. Under the dominance of
those instincts, a man lost caste—became an object of contemptuous
derision, if he couldn't keep his wife. It was bad enough to have another
man take her away from him, but it was worse to have her go away in the
absence of such an excuse; worst of all, to have her go away to seek a job
and earn her own living.
Rose didn't know how long the secret could be kept. Wherever she went,
whatever she did, there'd always be the risk that some one who could carry
back the news to Rodney's friends, would recognize her. It was a risk that
had to be taken, and she didn't intend to allow herself to be paralyzed by a
perpetual dread of what might at any time happen. At the same time, she'd
protect the secret as well as she could.
But there were two people it couldn't be kept from—Portia and her
mother. Rose had at first entertained the notion of keeping her mother in the
dark. It wasn't until she had spent a good many hours figuring out
expedients for keeping the deception going, that she realized it couldn't be
done. She had been writing her mother a letter a week ever since the
departure to California—letters naturally full of domestic details that simply
couldn't be kept up. The only possible deception would be a compromise
with the truth and compromises of that sort are apt to be pretty
unsatisfactory. They suggest concealments in every phase, and to an
imaginative mind, are more terrifying, nine times in ten, than the truth
you're trying to soften. Then, too, the story given out to Rodney's friends
being that Rose was in California with her mother and Portia, left the
chance always open for some contretemps which would lead to her mother's
discovering the truth in a surprising and shocking way.
But the truth itself, confidently stated, not as a tragic ending, but as the
splendid hopeful beginning of a life of truer happiness for Rose and her
husband, needn't be a shock. So this was what Rose had borne down on in
her letter to Portia. It wasn't a very long letter, considering how much it had
to tell.

"... I have found the big thing couldn't be had
without a fight," she wrote. "You shouldn't be surprised,
because you've probably found out for yourself that
nothing worth having comes very easily. But you're not
to worry about me, nor be afraid for me, because I'm
going to win. I'm making the fight, somehow, for you as
well as for myself. I want you to know that. I think that
realizing I was living your life as well as mine, is what
has given me the courage to start....

"I've got some plans, but I'm not going to tell you
what they are. But I'll write to you every week and tell
you what I've done and I want you to write to Rodney. I
want to be sure that you understand this: Rodney isn't to
blame for what's happened. I don't feel that I am, either,
exactly. We're just in a situation that there's only one
real way out of. I don't know whether he sees that yet or
not. He's too terribly hurt and bewildered. But we
haven't quarreled, and I believe we're further in love
with each other than we've ever been before. I know I
am with him....

"Break this thing to mother as gently as you like,
but tell her everything before you stop...."

This letter written and despatched, she had worked out the details of her
departure with a good deal of care. In her own house, before her servants,
she had tried to act—and she felt satisfied that her attempt was successful—
just as she would have done had her pretended telegram really come from
Portia. She had packed, looked up trains, made a reservation. She had called
up Frederica and told her the news. The train she had selected left at an hour
and on a day when she knew Frederica wouldn't be able to come and see her
off. Frederica had come down to the house of course to say good-by to her,
and carrying her pretense through that scene, that had for her so much
deeper and more poignant a regret than she dared show—because she really
loved Frederica—was, next to bidding the twins good-by, the hardest thing

she had to go through with. Lying and pretending were always terribly hard
for Rose, and a lie to any one she was fond of, almost impossible. The only
thing that enabled her to see it through, was the consideration that she was
doing it for Rodney. He'd probably tell Frederica what had happened in
time, but Rose was determined that he should have the privilege of
choosing his own time for doing it.
Her bag was packed, her trunk was gone, her motor waiting at the door to
take her to the station, when the maid Doris brought the twins home from
their airing. This wasn't chance, but prearrangement.
"Give them to me;" Rose said, "and then you may go up and tell Mrs.
Ruston she may have them in a few minutes."
She took them into her bedroom and laid them side by side on her bed.
They had thriven finely—justified, as far as that went, Harriet's decision in
favor of bottle feeding. Had she died back there in that bed of pain, never
come out of the ether at all, they'd still be just like this—plump, placid,
methodical. Rose had thought of that a hundred times, but it wasn't what
she was thinking of now.
The thing that caught her as she stood looking down on them, was the
wave of sudden pity. She saw them suddenly as persons with the long road
all ahead of them, as a boy and a girl, a youth and a maid, a man and a
woman. They were destined to have their hopes and loves, fears, triumphs,
tragedies perhaps. The boy there, Rodney, might have to face, some day, the
situation his father confronted now; might have to come back into an empty
home, and turn a stiff inexpressive face on a coolly curious world. Little
Portia there might find herself, some day, gazing with wide seared eyes, at a
life some unexpected turn of the wheel of Fate had thrust her, all
unprepared, into the midst of. Or it might be her fate to love without
attracting love—to drain all the blood out of her life in necessary sacrifices;
to wither that some one else might have a chance to grow. Those
possibilities were all there before these two solemn, staring, little helpless
things on the bed. What toys of Chance they were!

She'd never thought of them like that before. The baby she had looked
forward to—the baby she hadn't had—had never been thought of that way
either. It was to be something to provide her, Rose, with an occupation; to
enable her to interpret her life in new terms; to make an alchemic change in
the very substance of it. The transmutation hadn't taken place. She surmised
now, dimly, that she hadn't deserved it should.
"You've never had a mother at all, you poor little mites," she said. "But
you're going to have one some day. You're going to be able to come to her
with your troubles, because she'll have had troubles herself. She'll help you
bear your hurts, because she's had hurts of her own. And she'll be able to
teach you to stand the gaff, because she's stood it herself."
For the first time since they were born, she was thinking of their need of
her rather than of her need of them and with that thought, came for the first
time, the surge of passionate maternal love that she had waited for, so long
in vain. There was, suddenly, an intolerable ache in her heart that could only
have been satisfied by crushing them up against her breast; kissing their
hands—their feet.
Rose stood there quivering, giddy with the force of it. "Oh, you darlings!"
she said. "But wait—wait until I deserve it!" And without touching them at
all, she went to the door and opened it. Mrs. Ruston and Doris were both
waiting in the hall.
"I must go now," she said. "Good-by. Keep them carefully for me." Her
voice was steady, and though her eyes were bright, there was no trace of
tears upon her cheeks. But there was a kind of glory shining in her face that
was too much for Doris, who turned away and sobbed loudly. Even Mrs.
Ruston's eyes were wet.
"Good-by," said Rose again, and went down composedly enough to her
car.
She rode down to the station, shook hands with and said good-by to Otto,
the chauffeur, allowed the porter to carry her bag into the waiting-room.
There she tipped the porter, picked up the bag herself, and walked out the
other door; crossed over to Clark Street and took a street-car. At Chicago

Avenue she got off and walked north, keeping her eye open for placards
advertising rooms to let. It was at the end of about a half mile that she found
the hatchet-faced landlady, paid her three dollars, and locked her door, as a
symbol, perhaps, of the bigger heavier door that she had swung to and
locked on the whole of her past life.
Amid all the welter of emotions boiling up within her, grief was not
present. There was a very deep-reaching excitement that sharpened all her
faculties; that even made her see colors more brightly and hear fainter
sounds. There was an intent eagerness to get the new life fairly begun. But,
strangest of all, and yet so vivid that even its strangeness couldn't prevent
her being aware of it, was a perfectly enormous relief. The thing which,
when she had first faced it as the only thoroughfare to the real life she so
passionately wanted, had seemed such a veritable nightmare, was an
accomplished fact. The week of acute agony she had lived through while
she was forcing her sudden resolution on Rodney had been all but
unendurable with the enforced contemplation of the moment of parting
which it brought so relentlessly nearer. There had been a terror, too, lest
when the moment actually came, she couldn't do it. Well, and now it had
come and gone! The surgery of the thing was over. The nerves and sinews
were cut. The thing was done. The girl who stood there now in her three-
dollar room was free; had won a fresh blank page to write the characters of
her life upon.
She felt a little guilty about this. What heartless sort of a monster must
she be to feel—why, actually happy, at a moment like this? She ought to be
prone on the bed, her face buried in the musty pillow, sobbing her heart out.
But presently, standing there, looking down on the lumpy bed, she smiled
widely instead, over the notion of doing it as a sort of concession to
respectability. She had got her absolution from Rodney himself out of the
memory of their first real talk together. Discipline, he'd said, was accepting
the facts of life as they were. Not raising a lamentation because they weren't
different. The only way you had of getting anywhere was by riding on the
backs of your own passions. Well, her great ride was just beginning!

Rose dusted the mirror with a towel—a reckless act, as she saw for
herself, when she discovered she was going to have to use that towel for a
week—and took an appraising look at herself. Then she nodded confidently
—there was nothing the matter with her looks—and resumed her ulster, her
rubbers and her umbrella, for it was the kind of December day that called
for all three. Her landlady could stick the receipt under the door, she
reflected, as she locked it.
Two blocks down the street, she found, as predicted, the cigar store with
the blue sign, "Schulz Express," and left her trunk check there with her
address and fifty cents. Then, putting up her umbrella, and glowingly
conscious that she was saving a nickel by so doing, she set off down-town
afoot to get a job. She meant to get it that very afternoon. And, partly
because she meant to so very definitely, she did.
I don't mean to say that getting a job is a purely volitional matter. There is
the factor of luck, always large of course, though not quite so large as a
great many people suppose, and the factor of intelligence. Rose's
intelligence had been in pretty active training for the last year. Ever since
her talk with Simone Gréville had set her thinking, she had been learning
how to weigh and assess facts apart from their emotional nebulæ. She'd
taught herself how to look a disagreeable or humiliating fact in the face as
steadily and as coolly as she looked at any other fact.
She had accumulated a whole lot of facts about women in industry from
Barry Lake and Jane. She knew the sort of job and the sort of pay that the
average untrained woman gets. She knew some of the reasons why the pay
was so miserably, intolerably small. She knew about the vast army of young
women who weren't expected to be fully self-supporting, who counted on
marrying comfortably enough some day, and accepted board and lodging at
home as one of the natural laws of existence. But who, if they wanted
pocket money, pretty enough clothes to make them attractive enough for
men to want to marry; who, if they wanted to escape the stupid drudgery of
housework at home, had to go to work. They'd rather get eight dollars a
week than six, of course, or ten than eight. But as long as even six was
velvet (cotton-backed velvet, one might say) they'd take that, cheerfully
oblivious to the fact, as naturally one might expect them to be, that by

taking six, they established a standard at which a girl who had to earn her
own living simply couldn't live.
Rose knew exactly what would happen to her if she went to one of the
big State Street department stores and asked for a job. Jane had been trying
some experiments lately, and stating her results with convincing vivacity at
their little dinners afterward. There was no thoroughfare there.
She knew too, what sort of life she'd have to face if she offered herself
out in the West Side factory district as a cracker packer, a chocolate dipper,
a glove stitcher; any of those things. You got a sort of training, of course, at
any one of these trades. You learned to develop a certain uncanny
miraculous speed and skill in some one small operation, as remorseless and
unvaried as the coming into mesh and out again of two cogs in a pair of
gears. But the very highest skill could just about be made to keep you alive,
and it led to nothing else. You wore out your body and asphyxiated your
soul.
Rose didn't mean to do that. She was holding both body and soul in trust.
The penitential mood that had resulted from her talk with Portia was utterly
gone. She wasn't looking for hurts. Deliberately to impose tortures on
herself was as far from her intent as shirking any of the inevitable trials that
should come to her in the course of the day's work. The only way she could
see to a life of decent self-respecting independence lay through some sort of
special training—business training, she thought. She'd begin by learning to
be a stenographer—a cracking good stenographer. Miss Beach had begun
that way. She had a real job.
Only, Rose had first to get a job that would pay for her training; and not
only pay for it, but leave time for it; a problem which might have seemed
like the problem of lifting yourself by your boot straps, if it hadn't been for
Jimmy Wallace—Jimmy with his talk about chorus-girls.
The trouble with that profession, Jimmy had said, was that the
indispensable assets in it were not industry, intelligence, ambitions, but a
reasonably presentable pair of arms and legs (a good-looking face would
surely come in handy too) and a rudimentary sense of rhythm. Another

demoralizing thing about it, he had said, was the fact that the work wasn't
hard enough, except during rehearsal, to keep its votaries out of mischief.
When the notion first occurred to her that these statements of Jimmy's
might some day have an interest for her that was personal rather than
academic, she had dismissed it with a shrug of good-humored amusement.
It wasn't until her idea of leaving Rodney and going out and making a living
and a life for herself had hardened into a fixed resolution, and she had
begun serious consideration of ways and means, that she called it back into
her mind. There was no use blinking the facts. The one marketable asset she
would possess when she walked out of her husband's house, was simply—
how she looked.
Well then, if that was all you had, there was no degradation in using it
until you could make yourself the possessor of something else. And the
merit of this particular sort of job, for her, lay precisely in the thing that
Jimmy had cited as its chief disadvantage—it left you abundant leisure. You
might occupy that leisure getting into mischief—no doubt most chorus-girls
did. But there was nothing to prevent your using it to better advantage.
With this in mind, on the Sunday before Rose went away, she had studied
the dramatic section of the morning paper with a good deal of care and was
rewarded by finding among the news notes, an item referring to a new
musical comedy that was to be produced at the Globe Theater immediately
after the Christmas holidays. The Girl Up-stairs was the title of it. It was
spoken of as one of the regular Globe productions, so it was probable that
Jimmy Wallace's experience with the production of an earlier number in the
series would at least give her something to go by. The thing must be in
rehearsal now.
Granted that she was going to be a chorus-girl for a while, she could
hardly find a better place than one of the Globe productions to be one in.
According to Jimmy Wallace, it was a decent enough little place, and yet it
possessed the advantage of being spiritually as well as actually, west of
Clark Street. Rodney's friends were less likely to go there, and so have a
chance of recognizing her, than to any other theater in the city, barring of
course the flagrantly and shamelessly vulgar ones of the purlieus.

Among her older friends of school and college days, the chances were of
course worse. But even if she were seen on the stage by people who knew
her, even though they were to say to each other that that girl looked
surprisingly like Rose Aldrich, this would be a very different thing from full
recognition. She would be well protected by the utter unlikelihood of her
being in such a place; by the absence of anybody's knowledge that she had
flown off at a tangent from the orbit of Rodney's world. Then, too, she'd be
somewhat disguised no doubt, by make-up. Of course with all those
considerations weighed at their full value, there remained a risk that she
would be fully discovered and recognized. But it was a risk that couldn't be
avoided, whatever she did.
She entertained for a while, the notion of taking Jimmy Wallace into her
confidence—he had as many depositors of confidences on his books, as a
savings bank, and he was just as safe. It was altogether likely that he could
get her a job out of hand. He was still on the best of terms with the Globe
people, and he was a really influential critic. But even if he didn't get her a
job outright, he could at least tell her how to set about getting one for
herself—where to go, whom to ask for, the right way to phrase her request,
which makes such an enormous difference in things of that kind.
But she wasn't long in abandoning the notion of appealing to Jimmy at
all. The corner-stone of her new adventure must be that she was doing
things for herself; that she was through being helped, having ways
smoothed for her, things done for her. If she owed her first job even
indirectly to Jimmy, all the rest of her structure would be out of plumb.
Whatever success she might have would be tainted by the misgiving that
but for somebody else's help, she might have failed. Rose Stanton who had
rented that three-dollar room was going to be beholden to nobody!
The news item in the paper gave her really all she needed. It told her that
a production was in rehearsal and it mentioned the name of the director,
John Galbraith, referring to him as one of the three most prominent
musical-comedy directors in the country; imported from New York at vast
expense, to make this production unique in the annals of the Globe, and so
forth.

They hadn't rehearsed Jimmy's piece, she knew, in the theater itself, but
in all sorts of queer out-of-the-way places—in theaters that happened for
the moment to be "dark," in dance-halls; pretty much anywhere. This was
because there was another show running at the time at the Globe. She had
looked in the theater advertisements to see whether a show was running
there now. Yes, there was. Well, that gave her her formula.
When she asked at the box office at the Globe Theater, where they were
rehearsing The Girl Up-stairs to-day, the nicely manicured young man
inside, answered automatically, "North End Hall."
Evidently Jimmy Wallace couldn't have phrased the question better
himself. But the quality of the voice that asked it had, even to his not very
sensitive ear, an unaccustomed flavor. So, almost simultaneously with his
answer, he looked up from his finger-nails and shot an inquiring glance
through the grille.
What he saw betrayed him into an involuntary stare. He didn't mean to
stare; he meant to be respectful. But he was surprised. Rose, in the plainest
suit that she could hope would seem plausible to her servants for a traveling
costume to California, an ulster and a little beaver hat with a quill in it, had
no misgivings about looking the part of a potentially hard-working young
woman renting a three-dollar room on North Clark Street and seeking
employment in a musical-comedy chorus. A realization that her neat black
seal dressing-case wasn't quite in the picture, helped to account for the
landlady's puzzlement about her. But it hadn't been introduced in evidence
here. And yet the young man behind the grille seemed as surprised as the
landlady.
He repeated his answer to her question with the lubricant of a few more
words and a fatuous sort of smile. "I believe they rehearse in the North End
Hall this afternoon."
Rose couldn't help smiling a little herself. "I'm afraid," she said, "I'll have
to ask where that is."
"Not at all," said the young man idiotically, and he told her the address;
then cast about for a slip of paper to write it down on, racking his

thimbleful of brains all the while to make out who she could be. She wasn't
one of the principals in the company. They'd all reported and he hadn't
heard that any of them was to be replaced.
"Oh, you needn't write it," said Rose. "I can remember, thank you." She
gave him a pleasant sort of boyish nod that didn't classify at all with
anything in his experience, and walked out of the lobby.
He stared after her almost resentfully, feeling all mussed up, somehow,
and inadequate; as if here had been a situation that he had failed signally to
make the most of. He sat there for the next half-hour gloomily thinking up
things he might have said to her.

CHAPTER II

THE EVENING AND THE MORNING WERE THE FIRST
DAY

With her umbrella over her shoulder, Rose set sail northward again
through the rain, absurdly cheered; first by the fact that the opening
skirmish had distinctly, though intangibly, gone her way; secondly by the
small bit of luck that North End Hall would be, judging by its number on
North Clark Street, not more than a block or two from her three-dollar
room.
The sight of the entrance to it gave her a pang of misgiving. A pair of
white painted doors opened from the street level upon the foot of a broadish
stair which took you up rather suddenly; there was space enough between
the foot of the stair and the doors for a ticket-window, but it was too small

to be called a lobby; an arc lamp hung there though, and two more—all
three were extinct—hung just outside. What gave the place its air of
vulgarity, a suggestion of being the starting and finishing point for lewd,
drink sodden revels, she couldn't determine. It did suggest this plainly. But,
in the light of what Jimmy Wallace had told her, she didn't think it likely
there'd be any reveling to speak of at rehearsal.
At the head of the stairway, tilted back in a kitchen chair beneath a single
gas-jet whose light he was trying to make suffice for the perusal of a green
newspaper, sat a man, under orders no doubt, to keep intruders away.
Rose cast about as she climbed for the sort of phrase that would convince
him she wasn't an intruder. She would ask him, but in the manner of one
who seeks a formal assurance merely, if this was where they were
rehearsing The Girl Up-stairs. Three steps from the top, she changed her
tactics, as a result of a glance at his unshaven face. The thing to do was to
go by as if he weren't there at all—as if, for such as she, watchmen didn't
exist. The rhythmic pounding of feet and the frayed chords from a worn-out
piano, convinced her she was in the right place.

Her stratagem succeeded, but not without giving her a bad moment. The
man glanced up and, though she felt he didn't return to his paper again, he
made no attempt to stop her. But right before her was another pair of big
white doors, closed with an effect of permanence—locked, she suspected. A
narrower door to the left stood open, but over it was painted the
disconcerting legend "Bar," flanked on either side, to make the matter
explicit even to the unlearned, by pictorial representations of glasses of
foaming beer. She hadn't time to deliberate over her choice. The watchman's
eyes were boring into her back. If she chose wrong, or if she visibly
hesitated, she knew she'd hear a voice say, "Here! Where you going!"
She caught a quick breath, turned to the left and walked steadily through
the narrower door into the bar. It proved to be a deserted, shrouded, sinister-
looking place, with an interminable high mahogany counter at one side, and
with a lot of little iron tables placed by pairs, their tops together, so that half

of them had their legs in the air. Its lights were fled, its garlands dead all
right, but there wasn't anything poetic about it. However, there was another
open door at the far end of the room, through which sounds and light came
in. And the watchman hadn't interfered with her. Evidently she had chosen
right.
She paused for a second steadying breath before she went through that
farther door, her eyes starry with resolution, her cheeks, just for the
moment, a little pale. If the comparison suggests itself to you of an early
Christian maiden about to step out into an arena full of wild beasts, then
you will have mistaken Rose. The arena was there, true enough. But she
was stepping out into it with the intention of, like Androcles, taming the
lion.
The room was hot and not well lighted—a huge square room with a very
high ceiling. In the farther wall of it was a proscenium arch and a raised
stage somewhat brighter than the room itself, though the stained brick wall
at the back, in the absence of any scenery, absorbed a good deal of the light.
On the stage, right and left, were two irregular groups of girls, with a few
men, awkwardly, Rose thought, disposed among them. All were swaying a
little to mark the rhythm of the music industriously pounded out by a
sweaty young man at the piano—a swarthy, thick young man in his
undershirt. There were a few more people, Rose was aware without exactly
looking at any of them, sprawled in different parts of the hall, on sofas or
cushioned window-seats.
It was all a little vague to her at first, because her attention was focused
on a single figure—a compact, rather slender figure, and tall, Rose thought
—of a man in a blue serge suit, who stood at the exact center of the stage
and the extreme edge of the footlights. He was counting aloud the bars of
the music—not beating time at all, nor yielding to the rhythm in any way;
standing, on the contrary, rather tensely still. That was the quality about
him, indeed, that riveted Rose's attention and held her as still as he was, in
the doorway—an exhilarating sort of intensity that had communicated itself
to the swaying groups on the stage. You could tell from the way he counted
that something was gathering itself up, getting ready to happen. "Three ...
Four ... Five ... Six ... Seven ... Now!" he shouted on the eighth bar, and with

the word, one of the groups transformed itself. One of the men bowed to
one of the girls and began waltzing with her; another couple formed, then
another.
Rose watched breathlessly, hoping the maneuver wouldn't go wrong;—
for no reason in the world but that the man, there at the footlights, was so
tautly determined that it shouldn't.
Determination triumphed. The number was concluded to John Galbraith's
evident satisfaction. "Very good," he said. "If you'll all do exactly what you
did that time from now on, I'll not complain." Without a pause he went on,
"Everybody on the stage—big girls—all the big girls!" And, to the young
man at the piano, "We'll do Afternoon Tea." There was a momentary pause
then, filled with subdued chatter, while the girls and men re-alined
themselves for the new number—a pause taken advantage of by an
exceedingly blond young man to scramble up on the stage and make a few
remarks to the director. He was the musical director, Rose found out
afterward. Galbraith, to judge from his attitude, gave his colleague's
remarks about twenty-five per cent. of his attention, keeping his eye all the
while on the chorus, to see that they got their initial formation correctly.
Rose looked them over, too. The girls weren't, on an average, extravagantly
beautiful, though, with the added charm of make-up allowed for, there were
no doubt many the audiences would consider so. What struck Rose most
emphatically about them, was their youth and spirit. How long they had
been rehearsing this afternoon she didn't know. But now, when they might
have gone slack and silent, they pranced and giggled instead and showed a
disposition to lark about, which evidently would have carried them a good
deal further but for the restraining presence of the director. They were
dressed in pretty much anything that would allow perfect freedom to their
bodies; especially their arms and legs; bathing suits mostly, or middy-
blouses and bloomers. Rose noted this with satisfaction. Her old university
gymnasium costume would do perfectly. Anything, apparently, would do,
because as her eye adjusted itself to details, she discovered romper suits,
pinafores, chemises, overalls—all equally taken for granted. There weren't
nearly so many chorus men as girls. She couldn't be sure just how many
there were, because they couldn't be singled out. As they wore no distinctly

working costume, merely took off their coats, waistcoats and collars, they
weren't distinguishable from most of the staff, who, with the exception of
the director, garbed themselves likewise.
Galbraith dismissed the musical director with a nod, struck his hands
together for silence, and scrutinized the now motionless group on the stage.
"We're one shy," he said. "Who's missing?" And then answered his own
question: "Grant!" He wheeled around and his eyes searched the hall.
Rose became aware for the first time, that a mutter of conversation had
been going on incessantly since she had come in, in one of the recessed
window-seats behind her. Now, when Galbraith's gaze plunged in that
direction, she turned and looked too. A big blonde chorus-girl was in there
with a man, a girl, who, with twenty pounds trained off her, and that sulky
look out of her face, would have been a beauty. She had roused herself with
a sort of defiant deliberation at the sound of the director's voice, but she still
had her back to him and went on talking to the man.
"Grant!" said John Galbraith again, and this time his voice had a cutting
edge. "Will you take your place on the stage, or shall I suspend rehearsal
until you're ready?"
For answer she turned and began walking slowly across the room toward
the door in the proscenium that led to the stage. She started walking slowly,
but under Galbraith's eye, she quickened her pace, involuntarily, it seemed,
until it was a ludicrous sort of run. Presently she emerged on the stage,
looking rather artificially unconcerned, and the rehearsal went on again.
But just before he gave the signal to the pianist to go ahead, Galbraith
with a nod summoned a young man from the wings and said something to
him, whereupon, clearly carrying out his orders, he vaulted down from the
stage and came walking toward the doorway where Rose was still standing.
The director's gaze as it flashed about the hall, had evidently discovered
more than the sulky chorus-girl.
The young man wasn't intrinsically formidable—a rather limp,
deprecatory sort, he looked. But, as an emissary from Galbraith, he

quickened Rose's heart-beat a trifle. She smiled though as she made a small
bet with herself that he wouldn't be able to turn her out, even in his capacity
of envoy.
But he didn't come straight to Rose; deflected his course a little
uncertainly, and brought up before a woman who sat in a folding chair a
little farther along the wall.
Rose hadn't observed her particularly before, though she was aware that
one of the "big girls" who had responded promptly to Galbraith's first call
for them, had been talking to her when Rose came in, and she had assumed
her to be somebody connected with the show; at least with an
unchallengeable right to watch its rehearsals. But she had corrected this
impression even before she had heard what John Galbraith's assistant said to
the woman and what she said to him; for she drew herself defensively erect
when she saw him turn toward her, assumed a look of calculated disdain;
tapped a foot inadequately shod for Chicago's pavements in December,
although evidently it had experienced them—gave, on the whole, as well as
she could, an imitation of a duchess being kept waiting.
But the limp young man didn't seem disconcerted, and inquired in so
many words, what her business was. The duchess said in a harsh high voice
with a good deal of inflection to it, that she wanted to see the director; a
very partic'lar friend of his, she assured the young man, had begged her to
do so. "You'll have to wait till he's through rehearsing," said the young man,
and then he came over to Rose.
The vestiges of the smile the duchess had provoked were still visible
about her mouth when he came up. "May I wait and see Mr. Galbraith after
the rehearsal?" she asked. "If I won't be in the way?"
"Sure," said the young man. "He won't be long now. He's been rehearsing
since two." Then, rather explosively, "Have a chair."
He struck Rose as being a little flustered and uncertain, somehow, and he
now made a tentative beginning of actually bringing a chair for her.

"Oh, don't bother," said Rose, and now she couldn't help smiling outright.
"I'll find one for myself."
But, whenever he had begun rehearsing, it was evident that John
Galbraith didn't mean to stop until he got through, and it was a long hour
that Rose sat there in a little folding chair similar to the one occupied by the
duchess; an hour which, in spite of all her will could do, took some of the
crispness out of her courage. It was all very well to reflect with pitying
amusement on the absurdities of the duchess. But it was evident the duchess
was waiting with a purpose like her own. She meant to get a job in the
chorus. Her rather touching ridiculousness as a human being wouldn't stand
in her way. It was likely that she had had dozens of jobs in choruses before,
knew exactly what would be wanted of her, and was confident of her ability
to deliver it.
As Rose's heart sank lower with the dragging minutes she even took into
account the possibility that the duchess had spoken the truth about John
Galbraith's "partic'lar friend." Just the mention of a name might settle the
whole business. Then her spirits went down another five degrees. Here she
had been assuming all along that there was a job for either of them to get!
But it was quite likely there was not. The chorus looked complete enough;
there was no visible gap in the ranks crying aloud for a recruit.
When at last, a little after six o'clock, Galbraith said, "Quarter to eight,
everybody," and dismissed them with a nod for a scurry to what were
evidently dressing-rooms at the other side of the ball, the ship of Rose's
hopes had utterly gone to pieces. She had a plank to keep herself afloat on.
It was the determination to stay there until he should tell her in so many
words that he hadn't any use for her and under no conceivable
circumstances ever would have.
The deprecatory young man was talking to him now, about her and the
duchess evidently, for he peered out into the hall to see if they were still
there; then vaulted down from the stage and came toward them.
The duchess got up, and with a good deal of manner, went over to meet
him. Rose felt outmaneuvered here. She should have gone to meet him

herself, but a momentary paralysis kept her in her chair. She didn't hear
what the duchess said. The manner of it was confidential, in marked protest
against the proximity of a handful of other people—the blond musical
director, the thick pianist in his undershirt, a baby-faced man in round
tortoise-shell spectacles, three or four of the chorus people, each of whom
had serious matters to bring before the director's attention.
But all the confidences, it seemed, were on the side of the duchess.
Because, when John Galbraith answered her, his voice easily filled the
room. "You tell Mr. Pike, if that's his name, that I'm very much obliged to
him, but we haven't any vacancies in the chorus at present. If you care to,
leave your name and address with Mr. Quan, the assistant stage manager;
then if we find we need you, we can let you know."

"I want a job in the chorus."

He said it not unkindly, but he exercised some power of making it evident
that as he finished speaking, the duchess, for him, simply ceased to exist.
Anything she might say or do thereafter, would be so much effort utterly
wasted.
The duchess drew herself up and walked away.
And Rose? Well, the one thing she wanted passionately to do just then,
was to walk away herself out of that squalid horrible room; to soften her
own defeat by evading the final sledge-hammer blow. What he had said to
the duchess licensed her to do so. If there were no vacancies ... But she
clenched her hands, set her teeth, pulled in a long breath, and somehow, set
herself in motion. Not toward the door, but toward where John Galbraith
was standing.
But before she could get over to him, the pianist and the musical director
had got his attention. So she waited quietly beside him for two of the
longest minutes that ever were ticked off by a clock. Then, with
disconcerting suddenness, right in the middle of one of the musical
director's sentences, he looked straight into her face and said: "What do you
want?"
She'd thought him tall, but he wasn't. He was looking on a perfect level
into her eyes.
"I want a job in the chorus," said Rose.
"You heard what I said to that other woman, I suppose?"
"Yes," said Rose, "but ..."
"But you thought you'd let me say it to you again."
"Yes," she said. And, queerly enough, she felt her courage coming back.
She managed the last "yes" very steadily. It had occurred to her that if he'd
wanted merely to get rid of her, he could have done it quicker than this. He
was looking her over now with a coolly appraising eye.
"What professional experience have you had?" he asked.

"I haven't had any."
He almost smiled when she stopped there.
"Any amateur experience?" he inquired.
"Quite a lot," said Rose; "pageants and things, and two or three little
plays."
"Can you dance?"
"Yes," said Rose.
He said he supposed ballroom dancing was what she meant, whereupon
she told him she was a pretty good ballroom dancer, but that it was
gymnastic dancing she had had in mind.
"All right," he said. "See if you can do this. Watch me, and then imitate
me exactly."
In the intensity of her absorption in his questions and her own answers to
them, she had never given a thought to the bystanders. But now as they fell
back to give him room, she swept a glance across their faces. They all wore
smiles of sorts. There was something amusing about this—something out of
the regular routine. A little knot of chorus-girls halted in the act of going out
the wide doors and stood watching. Was it just a hoax? The suppressed
unnatural silence sounded like it. But at what John Galbraith did, one of the
bystanders guffawed outright.
It wasn't pretty, the dance step he executed—a sort of stiff-legged skip
accompanied by a vulgar hip wriggle and concluding with a straight-out
sidewise kick.
A sick disgust clutched at Rose as she watched—an utter revulsion from
the whole loathly business. She could scrub floors—starve if she had to.
She couldn't do the thing he demanded of her here out in the middle of the
floor, in her street clothes, without the excuse of music to make it tolerable
—and before that row of leering faces.
"Well?" he asked, turning to her as he finished. He wasn't smiling at all.

"I'm not dressed to do that," she said.
"I know you're not," he admitted coolly, "but it can be done. Pick up your
skirts and do it as you are,—if you really want a job."
There was just a faint edge of contempt in that last phrase and,
mercifully, it roused her anger. A blaze kindled in her blue eyes, and two
spots of vivid color defined themselves in her cheeks.
She caught up her skirts as he had told her to do, executed without
compromise the stiff-legged skip and the wriggle, and finished with a
horizontal sidewise kick that matched his own. Then, panting, trembling a
little, she stood looking straight into his face.
The first thing she realized when the processes of thought began again
was that even if there had been a hoax, she was not, in the event, the victim
of it. The attitude of her audience told her that. Galbraith was staring at her
with a look that expressed at first, clear astonishment, but gradually
complicated itself with other emotions—confusion, a glint of whimsical
amusement. That gleam, a perfectly honest, kindly one, decided Rose to
take him on trust. He wasn't a brute, however it might suit his purposes to
act like one. And with an inkling of how her blaze of wrath must be
amusing him, she smiled slowly and a little uncertainly, herself.
"We've been rehearsing this piece two weeks," he said presently, looking
away from her when he began to talk, "and I couldn't take any one into the
chorus now whom I'd have to teach the rudiments of dancing to. I must
have people who can do what I tell them. That's why a test was necessary.
Also, from now on, it would be a serious thing to lose anybody out of the
chorus. I couldn't take anybody who had come down here—for a lark."
"It's not a lark to me," said Rose.
Now he looked around at her again. "I know it isn't," he said. "But I
thought when you first came in here, that it was."
With that, Rose understood the whole thing. It was evidently a fact that
despite the plain little suit, the beaver hat, the rough ulster she was wearing,
she didn't look like the sort of girl who had to rely on getting a job in the

chorus for keeping a roof over her head. Looks, speech, manner—
everything segregated her from the type. It was all obvious enough, only
Rose hadn't happened to think of it. It accounted, of course, for the rather
odd way in which the landlady, the ticket-seller at the Globe, and meek little
Mr. Quan, the assistant stage manager, all had looked at her, as at some one
they couldn't classify. John Galbraith, out of a wider experience of life, had
classified her, or thought he had, as a well-bred young girl who, in a
moment of pique, or mischief, had decided it would be fun to go on the
stage. The test he had applied wasn't, from that point of view, unnecessarily
cruel. The girl he had taken her for, would, on being ordered to repeat that
grotesque bit of vulgarity of his, have drawn her dignity about her like a
cloak, and gone back in a chastened spirit to the world where she belonged.
A gorgeous apparition came sweeping by them just now, on a line from
the dressing-room to the door—a figure that, with regal deliberation, was
closing a blue broadcloth coat, trimmed with sable, over an authentic Callot
frock. The Georgette hat on top of it was one that Rose had last seen in a
Michigan Avenue shop. She had amused herself by trying to vizualize the
sort of person who ought to buy it. It had found its proper buyer at last—
fulfilled its destiny.
"Oh, Grant!" said John Galbraith.
The queenly creature stopped short and Rose recognized her with a jump,
as the sulky chorus-girl. Dressed like this, her twenty pounds of surplus fat
didn't show.
Galbraith walked over to her. "I shan't need you any more, Grant." He
spoke in a quiet impersonal sort of way, but his voice had, as always, a
good deal of carrying power. "It's hardly worth your while trying to work, I
suppose, when you're so prosperous as this. And it isn't worth my while to
have you soldiering. You needn't report again."
He nodded not unamiably, and turned away. Evidently she had ceased to
exist for him as completely as the duchess. She glared after him and called
out in a hoarse throaty voice, "Thank Gawd I don't have to work for you."

He'd come back to Rose again by this time, and she saw him smile.
"When you do it," he said over his shoulder, "thank Him for me too." Then
to Rose: "She's a valuable girl; had lots of experience; good-looking;
audiences like her. I'm giving you her place because as long as she's got
those clothes and the use of a limousine, she won't get down to business. I'd
rather have a green recruit who will. I'm hiring you because I think you will
be able to understand that what you feel like doing isn't important and that
what I tell you to do is. The next rehearsal is at a quarter to eight to-night.
Give your name and address to Mr. Quan before you go. By the way, what
is your name?"
"Rose Stanton," she said. "But ..." She had to follow him a step or two
because he had already turned away. "But, may I give some other name than
that to Mr. Quan?" He frowned a little dubiously and asked her how old she
was. And even when she told him twenty-two, he didn't look altogether
reassured.
"That's the truth, is it? I mean, there's nobody who can come down here
about three days before we open and call me a kidnaper, and lead you away
by the ear?"
"No," said Rose gravely, "there's no one who'll do that."
"Very good," he said. "Tell Quan any name you like."
The name she did tell him was Doris Dane.
It was a quarter to seven when she came out through the white doors into
North Clark Street. The thing that woke her out of a sort of daze as she
trudged along toward her room in the unrelenting rain was a pleasurable
smell of fried onions; whereupon she realized that she was legitimately and
magnificently hungry. In any other condition, the dingy little lunch-room
she presently turned into, would hardly have invited her. But the spots on
the frayed starchy table-cloth, the streakiness of the glasses, the necessity of
polishing knife and fork upon her damp napkin, couldn't prevent her doing
ample justice to a small thick platter of ham and eggs, and a plate of thicker
wheat-cakes.

It occurred to her as she finished, that a quarter to eight probably meant
the hour at which the rehearsal was to begin. She'd have to be back at the
hail at least fifteen minutes earlier, in order to be dressed and ready. She had
no time to waste; would even have to hurry a little.
She didn't try to explore for the reason why this discovery pleased her so
much. It was enough that it did. She flew along through the rain to her
tunnel, charged up the narrow stair, and in the unlighted corridor outside her
room, collided with her trunk. Well, it was lucky it had come anyway. She
tugged it into her room after she had lighted the gas.
You might have seen, if you had been there to see, just a momentary
hesitation after she'd got her trunk key out of her purse before she unlocked
it. It was a sort of Jack-in-the-box, that trunk. Would the emotions with
which she'd packed it, spring out and clutch her as she released the hasp?
The saving factor in the situation was that it was a quarter past seven. In
fifteen minutes she must be back at North End Hall, getting ready to go to
work at her job. Suppose she hadn't found a job this afternoon? The thought
turned her giddy.
She plunged into her trunk, rummaged out a middy-blouse, a pair of
black silk bloomers, and her gymnasium sneakers, rolled them all together
in a bundle, got into her rubbers and her ulster again, and—I'm afraid there
is no other word for it—fled.
She was one of the first of the chorus to reach the hail and she had nearly
finished putting on her working clothes before the rest of them came pelting
in. But she didn't get out quickly enough to miss the sensation that was
exciting them all—the news that Grant had been dropped. A few of them
were indignant; the rest merely curious. The indignant ones allowed
themselves a license in the expression of this feeling that positively
staggered Rose; made use in a quite matter-of-fact way of words she had
supposed even a drunken truck-man would have attempted to refrain from
in the presence of a woman. She made a discovery afterward, that there
were many girls in the chorus who never talked like that; and among those
who did, the further distinction between those who used vile language
casually, or even jocularly, and those who were driven to it only by anger.

But for these first few minutes in the dressing-room, she felt as if she had
blundered into some foul pit abysmally below the lowest level of decency.
One of the girls advanced the theory that Grant hadn't finally been
dropped; it was absurd that she should be. She was one of the most popular
chorus-girls in Chicago. The director was merely trying to scare her into
doing better work for him. She'd come back, all right. She had reasons of
her own, this girl intimated, for wanting to work, despite the possession of
French clothes and the use of a limousine. Her "friend," it seemed, needed
to be taught some sort of lesson. Grant would come around before to-
morrow night, and eat enough humble pie to induce Galbraith to take her
back.
If this theory were sound, and it had a dreadful plausibility to Rose, her
only chance for keeping her job would be to do as well as Grant could do,
to-night, in this very first rehearsal; and she went out on the stage in a
perfect agony of determination. She must see everything, hear everything;
put all she knew and every ounce of energy she had, into the endeavor to
make John Galbraith forget that she was a recruit at all.
The intensity of this preoccupation was a wonderful protection to her. It
kept away the sick disgust that had threatened her in the dressing-room;
prevented her even glancing ahead to a future that would, had she taken to
guessing about it, utterly have overwhelmed her. The intensely illuminated
present instant kept her mind focused to its sharpest edge.
It is true that before she had been working fifteen minutes, she had
forgotten all about Grant and the possibility of her return. She'd even
forgotten her resolution not to let John Galbraith remember she was a
recruit. Indeed, she had forgotten she was a recruit. She was nothing at all
but just a reflection of his will. She'd felt that quality strongly in him even
behind his back during the afternoon rehearsal. Now, on the stage in front of
him, she was completely possessed by it.
She didn't know she was tired, panting, wet all over with sweat. Really, of
course, she was pretty soft, judged by her own athletic standards. She hadn't
done anything so physically exacting as this for over a year. But she had the

illusion that she wasn't doing anything now; that she was just a passive
plastic thing, tossed, flung, swirled about by the driving power of the
director's will. It wouldn't have surprised her if the chairs had danced for
him.
It couldn't of course have occurred to her that she was producing her own
effect on the director; she couldn't have surmised that he was driving his
rehearsal at a faster pace and with a renewed energy and fire because of the
presence, there in the ranks of his chorus, of a glowing, thrilling creature
who devoured his intentions half formed, met them with a blue spark across
the poles of their two minds.
She realized, when the rehearsal was over, that it had gone well and that it
couldn't have gone so if her own part had been done badly. She hesitated a
moment after he'd finally dismissed them with a nod, and an, "Eleven
o'clock to-morrow morning, everybody," from a previously formed
intention of asking him if she'd do. But she felt, somehow, that such a
question would be foolish and unnecessary.
He had marked her hesitation and shot her a look that she felt followed
her as she walked off, and she heard him say to the world in general and in
a heartfelt sort of way, "Good God!" But she didn't know that it was the
highest encomium he was capable of, nor that it was addressed to her.
She carried away, however, a glow that saw her back to her room, and
through the processes of unpacking and getting ready for bed, though it
faded swiftly during the last of these. But when the last thing that she could
think of to do had been done, when there was no other pretext, even after a
desperate search for one, that could be used to postpone turning out her
light and getting into bed, she had to confess to herself that she was afraid
to do it. And with that confession, the whole pack of hobgoblin terrors she
had kept at bay so valiantly since shutting her husband's door behind her,
were upon her back.
Here she was, Rose Aldrich, in a three-dollar-a-week room on North
Clark Street, having deserted her husband and her babies—a loving honest
husband, and a pair of helpless babies not yet three months old—to become

a member of the chorus in a show called The Girl Up-stairs! Was there a
human being in the world, except herself, who would not, as the most
charitable of possible explanations, assume her to be mad? Could she
herself, seeing her act cut out in silhouette like that, be sure she wasn't mad?
Hysterical anyway, the victim of her own rashly encouraged fancies, just as
Rodney had so often declared she was? Oughtn't she to have let James
Randolph explore the subconscious part of her mind and find the crack
there must be in it, that could have driven her to a crazy act like this?
It didn't matter now. She couldn't go back. She never could go back after
the things she had said to Rodney, until she had made good those fantastic
theories of hers. Probably he wouldn't want her to come back even then.
He'd find out where she was of course—what she was doing. Why had she
been such a fool, going away, as not to have gone far enough to be safe?
He'd feel that she'd disgraced him. Any man would. And he'd never forgive
her. He'd divorce her, perhaps. He'd have a right to, if she stayed away long
enough. And, without her there, with nothing of her but memories—
tormenting memories, he'd perhaps fall in love with some one else—marry
some one else. And her two babies would call that unknown some one
"mother." She must have been crazy! She'd thought she didn't love them.
That had been a delusion anyway. Her heart ached for them now—an actual
physical ache that almost made her cry out. And for Rodney himself, for his
big strong arms around her! Would she ever feel them again?
She told herself this was a nightmare—something to be fought off, kept at
bay. But how did that help her now, when the armor must be laid aside?
Sometime or other she must turn out that light and lie down in that bed,
defenseless. She had never in her life asked more of her courage than when,
at last, she did that thing. There were nine hours then ahead of her before
eleven o'clock and the next rehearsal.

CHAPTER III

ROSE KEEPS THE PATH

Rose rehearsed twice a day for a solid week without forming the faintest
conception of who "the girl" was or why she was "the girl up-stairs." She
didn't know what sort of scene it was for instance that they burst in on
through the space marked by two of the little folding chairs brought up from
the floor of the dance-hall for the purpose. The group of iron tables
borrowed from the bar and set solidly together in the upper right-hand
corner of the stage whenever they rehearsed a certain one of their song
numbers, might with equal plausibility represent a mountain in Arizona, the
front veranda of a house or a banquet table in the gilded dining-hall of some
licentious multi-millionaire. They got up on the insecure thing and tried to
dance; that was all she knew.
During the entire period, and for that matter, right up to the opening night
she never saw a bar of music except what stood on the piano rack, nor a
written word of the lyrics she was supposed to sing. Rose couldn't sing very
much. She had a rather timorous, throaty little contralto that contrasted
oddly with the fine free thrill of her speaking voice. But nobody had asked
her what her voice was, nor indeed, whether she could sing at all. She
picked up the tunes quickly enough, by ear, but the words she was always a
little uncertain about.
It all seemed too utterly haphazard to be possible, but Rose decided not to
ask any of the authorities about this, because, while the possibility of
Grant's return dangled over her head, she didn't want to remind anybody
how green she was. But she finally questioned one of her colleagues in the
chorus about it, and was told that back at the beginning of things, they had
had their voices tried by the musical director, who had conducted three or
four music rehearsals before John Galbraith arrived. They had never had
any music to sing from but there had been half a dozen mimeograph copies
of the words to the songs, which the girls had put their heads together over
in groups of three or four, and more or less learned. What had become of

this dope, and whether it was still available for Rose in case she were
animated by a purely supererogatory desire to study it, the girl didn't know.
She was a pale-haired girl, whom Rose thought she had heard addressed
as Larson, and she had emerged rather slowly as an individual personality,
out of the ruck of the chorus; a fact in her favor, really, because the girls
who had first driven themselves home to Rose through the shell of her
intense preoccupation with doing what John Galbraith wanted, had been the
vividly and viciously objectionable ones. The thing that had prompted her
to sit down beside Larson and, with this question about how one learned the
words to the songs, take her first real step toward an acquaintance, was an
absence of any strong dislike, rather than the presence of a real attraction.
She made a surprising discovery when the girl, with a friendly pat on the
sofa beside her, for an invitation to her to sit down, began answering her
question. She was a real beauty. Or, more accurately, she possessed the
constituent qualities of beauty. She was pure English eighteenth century;
might have stepped down out of a Gainsborough portrait. Dressed right, and
made up a little, with her effects legitimately heightened (and warned not to
speak), she could have gone to the Charity Ball as the Honorable Mrs.
Graham, and Bertie Willis would have gone mad about her. Only you had to
look twice at her to perceive that this was so; and what she lacked was just
the unanalyzable quality that makes one look twice.
Her speaking voice would have driven Bertie mad, too—foaming, biting
mad. It was disconcertingly loud, in the first place, and it came out upon the
promontories of speech with a flat whang that fairly made you jump. Its
undulations of pitch gave you something the same sensation as riding
rapidly over a worn-out asphalt pavement in a five-hundred-dollar
automobile; unforeseen springs into the air, descents into unexpected pits.
Her grammar wasn't flagrantly bad, though it had, rather pitiably, a touch of
the genteel about it. But now, when she spoke to Rose, and with the
lassitude of fatigue in her voice besides, Rose heard something friendly
about it.
"I don't know what you should worry about any of that stuff for," she
said. "How you sing or what you sing don't make much difference."

Rose admitted that it didn't seem to. "But you see," she said (she hadn't
had a human soul to talk to for more than a week and she had to make a
friend of somebody); "you see, I've just got to keep this job. And if every
little helps, as they say, perhaps that would."
The girl looked at her oddly, almost suspiciously, as if for a moment she
had doubted whether Rose had spoken in good faith. "You've got as good a
chance of losing your job," she said, "as Galbraith has of losing his."
"I don't worry about it," said Rose, "when I'm up there on the stage at
work. It's too exciting. And then, I feel somehow that it's going all right. But
early in the morning, I get to imagining all sorts of things. He's so terribly
sudden. The girl whose place I got,—she hadn't any warning, you know. It
just happened."
The Larson girl gave a decisive little nod. Not so much, it seemed, in
assent to what Rose had just said, but as if some question in her own mind
had been answered.
"You'll get used to that feeling," she said. "You've got to take a chance
anyway, so why worry? We can work our heads off, but if the piece is a fliv
the opening night, they'll tack up the notice, and there we'll be with two
weeks' pay for eight weeks' work, and another six weeks' work for nothing
in something else if we're lucky enough to get it."
This was a possibility Rose hadn't thought of. "But—that isn't fair!" she
said.
The other girl laughed grimly. "Fair!" she echoed. "What they want to
print that word in the dictionary for, I don't see. Because what it means don't
exist. Not where I live, anyway. But what's the good of making a fuss about
it? We've got to take our chance like everybody else."
"I don't believe this piece will fall, though," said Rose. "I don't think Mr.
Galbraith would let it. I think he's a perfect wonder, don't you?"
The Larson girl looked at her again. "He's supposed to be about the best
in the business," she said, "and I guess he is." She added, "Dave tells me
he's going to put you with us in the sextette."

Dave was the thick pianist, and Rose had found him in the highest degree
obnoxious. He seemed to occupy an indeterminate social position in their
ship's company, between the forecastle, which was the chorus, and the
quarter-deck, which comprised Galbraith (you might call him the pilot), the
baby-faced man with the tortoise-shell spectacles, reputed to be the author,
two awesome intermittent gentlemen identified in the dressing-room as the
owners of the piece, and the musical director, together with one or two more
as yet unclassified. The principals, when they should appear, would, Rose
assumed, belong on the quarter-deck too. The social gap between this
afterguard and Rose and her colleagues in the chorus, was not so very wide,
but it was abysmally deep. Nevertheless, the pianist, buoyed up on the
wings of a boundless effrontery, seemed to manage to remain unaware of it.
He had started rehearsals with this piece, it appeared, as a chorus-man,
and had become a pianist, thanks to the interposition of Fate (the real
pianist had fallen suddenly and desperately ill), and to his own irresistible
assurance that he could do anything. He could keep time and he hit perhaps
a third of the notes right.
The chorus liked him. The girls all called him Dave, seemed to appreciate
his notion of humor, and accepted his hugs and pawings as a matter of
course. But he took his jokes, his familiarities, and his apparently
impregnable self-esteem, upon the quarter-deck—slapped the author on the
back now and then, and had even been known to address John Galbraith as
"Old man." Incidentally, he hung about within ear-shot during conferences
of the powers, freely offered his advice, and brought all sorts of interesting
tidbits of gossip and prophecy back to the chorus.
His announcement that Rose was going to be put into the sextette was
entitled to consideration, even though it couldn't be banked on. There were
three mediums and three big girls in the sextette. (Olga Larson was one of
the mediums and so needn't fear replacement by Rose, who was a big girl.)
Besides appearing in two numbers as a background to one of the principals,
they had one all to themselves, a fact which constituted them a sort of
super-chorus. Galbraith used to keep them for endless drills after the
general rehearsal was dismissed.

But the intimation that Rose was to be promoted to this select inner
circle, didn't, as it first came to her, give her any pleasure. Somehow, as
Larson told her about it, she could fairly see the knowing greasy grin that
would have been Dave's comment on this prophecy. And in the same flash,
she interpreted the Larson girl's look, half incredulous, half satirical, and
her, "You've got as good a chance of losing your job as Galbraith has of
losing his."
"I haven't heard anything about being put in the sextette," she said
quietly, "and I don't believe I will be."
"Well, I don't know why not." There was a new warmth in the medium's
voice. Rose had won a victory here, and she knew it. "You've got the looks
and the shape, and you can dance better than any of the big girls, or us
mediums, either. And if he doesn't put that big Benedict lemon into the back
line where she belongs, and give you her place in the sextette, it will be
because he's afraid of her drag."
Rose forbore to inquire into the nature of the Benedict girl's drag.
Whatever it may have been, John Galbraith was evidently not afraid of it,
because as he dismissed that very rehearsal, calling the rest of the chorus
for twelve the following morning, and the sextette for eleven, he told Rose
to report at the earlier hour. And a moment later, she heard Dave say to the
big show girl named Vesta Folsom (some one with a vein of playful irony
must have been responsible for this christening), "Well, maybe I didn't call
that turn."
"You're the original wise guy, all right," Vesta admitted. "You're Joseph to
all the sure things."
Barring Olga Larson, the chorus was probably unanimous, Rose
reflected, in looking at it like that. They accounted for her having got a job
in the first place at Grant's expense, and a promotion so soon thereafter to
the sextette, by assuming that John Galbraith had a sentimental interest in
her. Whether his reward had been collected in advance, or was still unpaid,
was an interesting theme for debate. But that, past or present, the reward
was his actuating motive, it wouldn't occur to anybody to question.

There was no malice in this. Rose didn't lose caste with any of them on
account of it. But a chorus-girl is the most sentimental person in the world.
If there's anybody who really believes that love makes the world go round,
she is that one. It's love that actuates men to deeds of heroism or of crime;
it's love that makes men invest good money in musical comedies; love that
makes stars out of her undeserving sisters in the chorus; love that is always
waiting round the corner to open the door to wealth and fame for her.
So when Grant came back and ate her humble pie in vain, and later, when
Benedict was relegated to a place in the back line, the natural explanation
was that Galbraith was crazy about the new girl.
Of course it set Rose all ablaze with wrath when she became aware of
this. It was precisely because she had rebelled against the theory that love
was what made the world go round, that she was here in the chorus. Had
she been content to let it make her world go round, she never would have
left Rodney. The only way she had of refuting the assumption in this case
would be by making good so demonstrably and instantaneously, that they'd
be compelled to see that her promotion had been inevitable.
It was in this spirit, with blazing cheeks and eyes, that she attacked the
next morning's rehearsal. She was only dimly aware of Benedict out in the
hall in front, viperishly waiting for the arrival of one of the owners to make
an impassioned plea for reinstatement. Her tears or her tantrums were
matters of supremely little importance. But that John Galbraith should see
that he had promoted her on merit and on nothing but merit, mattered
enormously.
Lacking the clue, he watched her in a sort of amused perplexity. Her way
of snatching his instructions, her almost viciously determined manner of
carrying them out, would have been natural had she been working under the
spur of some stinging rebuke, instead of under the impetus of an unexpected
promotion.
"Don't make such hard work of it, Dane," he said at last. "You're all right,
but have a little fun out of it. There are eight hundred people out there," he
waved his arm out toward the empty hall, "who have paid their hard-earned