CHAPTER I

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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

Press of Braunworth & Co.

Bookbinders and Printers

Brooklyn, N.Y.

1916

[Illustration: "We can't talk here," he said. "We must go elsewhere."]

CONTENTS

BOOK I

THE GREAT ILLUSION

CHAPTER

I A Point of Departure

II Beginning an Adventure

III Frederica's Plan and What Happened to It

IV Rosalind Stanton Doesn't Disappear

V The Second Encounter

VI The Big Horse

VII How It Struck Portia

VIII Rodney's Experiment

IX After Breakfast

BOOK II

LOVE AND THE WORLD

I The Princess Cinderella

II The First Question and an Answer to It

III Where Did Rose Come In

IV Long Circuits and Short

V Rodney Smiled

VI The Damascus Road

VII How the Pattern Was Cut

VIII A Birthday

IX A Defeat

X The Door That Was to Open

XI An Illustration

XII What Harriet Did

XIII Fate Plays a Joke

XIV The Dam Gives Way

XV The Only Remedy

XVI Rose Opens the Door

BOOK III

THE WORLD ALONE

I The Length of a Thousand Yards

II The Evening and the Morning Were the First Day

III Rose Keeps the Path

IV The Girl With the Bad Voice

V Mrs. Goldsmith's Taste

VI A Business Proposition

VII The End of a Fixed Idea

VIII Success--and a Recognition

IX The Man and the Director

X The Voice of the World

XI The Short Circuit Again

XII "I'm All Alone"

XIII Frederica's Paradox

XIV The Miry Way

XV In Flight

XVI Anti-Climax

XVII The End of the Tour

XVIII The Conquest of Centropolis

BOOK IV

THE REAL ADVENTURE

I The Tune Changes

II A Broken Parallel

III Friends

IV Couleur-de-rose

V The Beginning

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.

[Illustration: 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.

[Illustration: "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.

[Illustration: "Oh, my dear! I didn't know!"]

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."

"_Un_fortunately!" 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.