He'd have said, if he'd set about formulating an explanation, that he

bought the house as a result of eliminating the alternatives to buying

it. Florence meant to sell it to somebody, and if he didn't buy it, he'd

have to move out. Rather disingenuously, he represented to himself that

his dislike of moving out sprang from the trouble that would be involved

in finding some other place to live in, furnishing it, reorganizing his

establishment. Really, he hadn't time for that. Frederica would have

done it for him in a minute, but he ignored that possibility.

Down underneath these shallow practical considerations, lay the fact

that such a reorganization would have been a tacit acknowledgment of

defeat; not only an acknowledgment to the world, which he'd have liked

to pretend didn't matter much, but an acknowledgment of defeat to

himself. What he had been trying to do ever since his return from that

maddening talk with Rose in Dubuque, had been just to sit tight; to go

on living a day at a time; to take the future in as small doses as he

could manage.

Had he been the sort of person who finds comfort in mottoes, he'd have

laid in a stock, such as, "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof";

"Holdfast is the only dog"; "Don't cross your bridges until you come to

them." As the period between the night of his discovery of Rose on the

Globe stage and the day of his return from Dubuque receded, and as the

fierceness of the pain of it died away again (because such pains do die

away. They can't keep screwed up into an ecstasy of torment forever) the

part he'd played in the events of it, seemed to him less and less worthy

of the sort of man he'd always considered himself to be; a

self-controlled, self-disciplined adult. He'd acted for a while there,

with the savage egotism of a distracted boy; thrown his dignity to the

winds; made a holy show of himself. Well, that period was over at all

events. Whatever the future might confront him with, he could promise

himself, he thought, to keep his head.

But for a while, he didn't want to be confronted with anything, let

alone to start anything; not until he could get his breath; not until he

had time to think everything out; discover, if possible, where the whole

miserable trouble had begun. He'd go back to the beginning, sometime,

and try to work it all out. It went, probably, a long way back of the

night when that hasty speech of his about not jeopardizing the

children's lives to gratify his wife's whims had set the match to her

resolution to leave him and the babies and live a life for herself.

But, though he told himself every day that he must begin ordering his

old memories, analyzing them, in search of the clue, he didn't begin the

process. Spiritually, he just held himself rigidly still. He might have

compared himself to a man standing off a pack of wolves, knowing that

his slightest move would precipitate a rush upon him. Or, perhaps more

nearly, to a man just recovering consciousness after an accident, afraid

to stir lest the smallest movement might reveal more serious injuries

than he suspected.

His mind had never worked so brilliantly as it was working now. The

problems involved in his clients' affairs were child's play to him. He

took them apart and put them together again with a careless, confident,

infallible perspicacity that amazed his colleagues and his opponents.

And, as Frank Crawford had pointed out, he took a savagely contemptuous

pleasure in making those clients pay through the nose.

But he could look neither back at Rose, nor forward to her. He could

not, by any stretch of resolution, have nerved himself to the point of

giving up that house that had nearly all his memories of her associated

with it. There hadn't been a change of a single piece of furniture in it

since she went away. Her bedroom and her dressing-room were just as she

had left them. Her clothes were just as they had been left after the

packing of that small trunk. She might have been off spending a week-end

somewhere.

The attitude couldn't be kept up forever, he knew. Some time or other

he'd have to cross the next bridge; come to some more definite

understanding with Rose than that inconclusive ridiculous scene there in

Dubuque had left him with. (_What_ a fool he had been that day!) There

were the twins coming along. For the present, their nurse (It wasn't

Mrs. Ruston. He'd taken the first reasonable excuse for supplanting

her.) and the pretty little snub-nosed nurse-maid Rose had liked, could

supply their wants well enough. But the time wasn't so far ahead when

they'd need a mother. What would he do then; let Rose have them half the

time and keep them half the time himself? He'd read a perfectly beastly

book once,--he couldn't remember the title of it--about a child who had

been brought up that way. But, at all events, he needn't do anything

yet.

Meanwhile, it healed his lacerated pride to march along and keep the

routine going. It was with a perfectly immense relief that he snatched

at the chance to buy the McCrea house, and by so doing make the

permanency of his way of life a little more secure. He could keep what

he had, anyway. And he could show the world, and Rose, that he wasn't

the broken frantic creature he knew she'd seen, and suspected it had

glimpsed. John Williamson's explanation wasn't altogether wrong.

Perhaps, had it been possible for Jimmy Wallace to tell him, just as he

told Violet and John Williamson, how Rose's voice "richened up as if

the words tasted good to her," when she mentioned the fact that she

heard from her husband "regularly but not much," he might have drawn the

same favorable augury from it that Violet did. But from her answering

communications, though he drew comfort, he got no hope.

It was Rose herself who began this correspondence, within a month of her

arrival in New York. And Rodney, when he finished reading her letter,

tore it to pieces and flung it into the fire, in a transport of

disappointment and anger. The sight of her writing on the envelope had

brought his heart into his mouth, of course. And when his shaking

fingers had got it open and he saw that it indeed contained a letter

from her, beginning "Dear Rodney," and signed "Rose," the wild surge of

hope that swept over him actually turned him giddy, so that it was two

or three minutes before he could read it.

But the thing ran like another instalment of the talk they had had in

Dubuque. She knew he had been distressed over the shabbiness of her

surroundings, knocking about with that road company, and she was afraid

that in spite of the assurance she had then given him, he was still

worried about her. She was sure he'd be glad to know that she'd quit the

stage for good, as an active performer on it, at least; that she was

earning an excellent salary, fifty dollars a week, doing a highly

congenial kind of work that had good prospects of advancement in it. She

had a very comfortable little apartment (she gave him the address of it)

and was living in a way that--she had written "even Harriet," but

scratched this out--Frederica, for example, would consider entirely

respectable. So he needn't feel another moment's anxiety about her.

She'd have written sooner, but had wanted to get fully settled in her

new job and be sure she was going to be able to keep it, in order that

she might have something definitely reassuring to tell him. And she

hoped he and the babies were well.

It was not until hours afterward, when the letter was an

indistinguishable fluff of white ash in the fireplace, that it occurred

to him that it had no satirical intent whatever and that the purpose of

it had been, quite simply, what it had pretended to be; namely, to

reassure him and put an end to his anxieties.

As he had read it in the revulsion from that literally sickening hope of

his, it had seemed about the most mordant piece of irony that had ever

been launched against him. The assumption of it had seemed to be that he

was the most pitiable snob in the world; that all he'd cared for had

been that she'd disgraced him by going on the stage. He'd be glad to

know that she was once more "respectable."

Well--this was the question which, as I said, he did not ask himself

until hours later--wasn't she justified in believing that? Certainly

that night, in her little room on North Clark Street, he'd given her

reason enough for thinking so. But later, in Dubuque--well, hadn't he

quoted Harriet to her? Hadn't he offered to help her as a favor to

himself, because he couldn't endure it that she should live like this?

Had he exhibited anything to her at all in their two encounters, but an

uncontrolled animal lust and a perfectly contemptible vanity?

He bitterly regretted having destroyed the letter. But the tone of it,

he was sure, except for that well merited jibe about Harriet, which had

been erased, was kindly. Yet he had acted once more, like a spoiled

child about it.

Could he write and thank her? In Dubuque she had asked him not to come

back. Did that prohibition cover writing? Her letter did not explicitly

revoke it. She asked him no questions. But he remembered now a

post-script, which, at the time of reading, he'd taken merely as a final

barb of satire. "I am still Doris Dane down here, of course," it had

read. If she hadn't meant that for a sneering assurance that his

precious name wasn't being taken in vain--and had he ever heard Rose

sneer at anybody?--what could have been the purpose of it except to make

sure that a letter from him wouldn't come addressed "Rose Aldrich," and

so fail to be delivered to her.

It was due only to luck that, in his first disappointment, he hadn't

destroyed her address with the letter. But she had duplicated it on the

flap of the envelope, and the envelope was not thrown in the fire.

He spent hours composing a reply. And the thing he finally sent off,

once it was committed to the post, seemed quite the worst of all his

efforts. His impulse was to send another on the heels of it. But he

waited a week, then wrote again. And this time, the stiffness of

self-consciousness was not quite so paralyzing. He managed to give her a

little real information about the condition of the twins and the

household. About himself, he stated that he was well, though busier than

he liked to be.

He experienced a very vague, faint satisfaction, two days later, over

the reflection that this letter was in her hands, and he came presently

to the audacious resolution that until she forbade him, he would go on

writing to her every week. She'd see that she needn't answer and it

would no doubt add something--how much he didn't dare to try to

estimate--to her happiness, to know that all was going well in the home

that she had left.

She began pretty soon to answer these letters with stiff little notes,

strictly limited to a bulletin of her own activities and a grateful

acknowledgment of the latest one he had sent her. Invariably, every

Tuesday morning, one of these notes arrived. And this state of things

continued, unchanged, for months.

He experienced a bewildering mixture of emotions over these letters of

hers. They drove him, sometimes, into outbursts of petulant rage. Often

the knowledge that one of them was to be expected in the morning,

delivered him up, against all the resistance he could make, to a flood

of tormenting memories of her. And across the mood the letter would find

him in, its cool little commonplaces would sting like the cut of a whip.

The mere facts her letters recounted aroused contradictory emotions in

him, too. They all spelled success and assurance, and almost from week

to week they marked advancement. The first effect of this was always to

make his heart sink; to make her seem farther away from him; to make the

possibility of any future need of him that would give him his

opportunity, seem more and more remote. The other feeling, whose glow he

was never conscious of till later--a feeling so surprising and

irrational that he could hardly call it by name, was pride. What in

God's name had he to be proud of? Was she a possession of his? Could he

claim any credit for her success? But the glow persisted in spite of

these questions.

His satisfaction in his own letters to her was less mixed. They must, he

thought, gradually be restoring in her mind, the image of himself as a

man who, as Harriet said, could take his medicine without making faces;

who could endure pain and punishment without howling about it. Perhaps,

in time, those letters would obliterate the memory of the vain beast

he'd been that night....

If Rodney had done an unthinkable thing; if he had kept copies of his

letters to Rose, along with her answers, in a chronological file the way

Miss Beach kept his business correspondence, he would have made the

discovery that the stiffness of them had gradually worn away and that

they were now a good deal more than mere _pro forma_ bulletins. There

had crept into them, so subtly and so gently that between one of them

and the next no striking difference was to be observed, a friendliness,

quite cool, but wonderfully firm. She was frankly jubilant over the

success of her costumes in _Come On In_ and she enclosed with her letter

a complete set of newspaper reviews of the piece. They reached him a day

or two before Jimmy Wallace telephoned, and this fact perhaps had

something to do with the gruff good humor with which he told Jimmy to go

as far as he liked in his newspaper paragraph.

It was a week later that she wrote:

"I met James Randolph coming up Broadway yesterday afternoon, about five

o'clock. I had a spare half-hour and he said he had nothing else but

spare half-hours; that was what he'd come to New York for. So we turned

into the Knickerbocker and had tea. He's changed, somehow, since I saw

him last; as brilliant as ever, but rather--lurid. Do you suppose things

are going badly between him and Eleanor? I'd hate to think that, but I

shouldn't be surprised. He spoke of calling me up again, but this

morning, instead, I got a note from him saying he was going back to

Chicago. He told me he hadn't seen you forever. Why don't you drop in on

him?"

* * * * *

It was quite true that Rodney had seen very little of the Randolphs

since Rose went away. His liking for James had always been an affair of

the intelligence. The doctor's mind, with its powers of dissecting and

coordinating the phenomena of every-day life, its luminous flashes, its

readiness to go all the way through to the most startling conclusions,

had always so stimulated and attracted his own, that he'd never stopped

to ask whether or not he liked the rest of the man that lay below the

intelligence.

When it came to confronting his friends, in the knowledge that they knew

that Rose had left him for the Globe chorus, he found that James

Randolph was one he didn't care to face. He knew too damned much. He'd

be too infernally curious; too full of surmises, eager for experiments.

The Rodney of a year before, intact, unscarred, without, he'd have said,

a joint in his harness, could afford to enjoy with no more than a

deprecatory grin, the doctor's outrageous and remorseless way of pinning

out on his mental dissecting board, anything that came his way. The

Rodney who came back from Dubuque couldn't grin. He knew too much of the

intimate agony that produced those interesting lesions and

abnormalities. Even in the security, if it could have been had, that his

own situation wouldn't be scientifically dissected and discussed, he'd

still have wanted to keep away from James Randolph.

But Rose's letter put a different face on the matter. He felt perfectly

sure that Randolph hadn't been analyzing her during that spare half-hour

at the Knickerbocker. The shoe, it appeared, had been on the other foot.

The fact that she'd put him, partly at least, in possession of what she

had observed and what she guessed, gave him a sort of shield against the

doctor. He told himself that his principal reason for going was to get a

little bit more information about Rose than her letters provided him

with. But the anticipation he dwelt on with the greatest pleasure,

really, was of saying, "Oh, yes. Rose wrote that she'd seen you."

So one evening, after keeping up the pretense through his solitary

dinner and the cigar that followed it, that he meant presently to go up

to his study and correct galley proofs on an enormous brief, he slipped

out about nine o'clock, and walked around to the Randolphs' new house.

This latest venture of Eleanor's had attracted a good deal of comment

among her friends. Somebody called it, with a rather cruel _double

entendre_, Bertie Willis' last word. In the obvious sense of the phrase,

this was true. Eleanor had given him a free hand, and he had gone his

limit. He'd been working slowly backward from Jacobean, through Tudor.

But this thing was perfect Perpendicular. You could, as John Williamson

said, kid yourself into the notion, when you walked under the

keel-shaped arch to their main doorway, that you were going to church.

And the style was carried out with inexorable rigor, down to the most

minute details. But since everybody knew that the latest thing, the

inevitably coming thing, was the pure unadulterated ugliness of

Georgian, a style that Bertie had opposed venomously (because he

couldn't build it, the uncharitable said); and because even Bertie's

carefully preserved youth was felt to have gone a little stale and it

was no longer fashionable to consider his charms irresistible, the

phrase, "his last word," was instantly understood, as I said, to have a

secondary sense.

No one, of course, could tell Eleanor anything about what the coming

styles were going to be, in architecture or anything else. She was one

of these persons with simply a sixth sense for fashions, and her having

gone to Bertie Willis, instead of to young Mellish of the historic New

York firm, McCleod, Hill, Stone & Black, who was doing such delightfully

hideous things in Georgian, caused, among her friends, a good deal of

comment. Her explanation that medicine was a medieval profession and

that she had to have a medieval house to go with James, was felt to be a

mere evasion.

It was recognized that one had to flirt with Bertie while he was

building her house. And in the days when everybody else had been doing

it, too, it didn't matter. But now that the celebrated _hareem_ had

ceased to exist, it was felt that one would do well to be a little

careful; at least, to put a more or less summary end to the flirtation

when the house was finished. But Eleanor hadn't done that. She was

playing with him more exclusively than ever.

Rodney hadn't been in the house before, and he reflected, as he stood at

the door, after ringing the bell, that his own house was quite meek and

conventional alongside this. The grin that this consideration afforded

him, was still on his lips when, a servant having opened the door, he

found himself face to face with the architect.

Bertie, top-coated and hat in hand, was waiting for Eleanor, who was

coming down the stairs followed by a maid with her carriage coat. He

returned Rodney's nod pretty stiffly, as was natural enough, since

Rodney's grin had distinctly brightened up at sight of him.

Eleanor said, rather negligently, "Hello, Rod. We're just dashing off to

the Palace to see a perfectly exquisite little dancer Bertie's

discovered down there. She comes on at half past nine, so we've got to

fly. Want to come?"

"No," Rodney said. "I came over to see Jim. Is he at home?"

The maid was holding out the coat for Eleanor's arms, Bertie was fussing

around ineffectually, hooking his stick over his left arm to give him a

free right hand to do something with, he didn't quite know what. But

Eleanor, at Rodney's question, just stood for a second quite still. She

wasn't looking at anybody, but the expression in her eyes was sullen.

"Yes, he's at home," she said at last.

"Busy, I suppose;" said Rodney. Her inflection had dictated this reply.

"Yes, he's busy," she repeated absently and in a tone still more coldly

hostile, though Rodney perceived that the hostility was not meant for

him. And so plainly did the tone and the look and the arrested attitude

proclaim that she was following out a train of thought and hadn't as yet

got to the end of it, that he stood as still as she was.

Bertie, irreproachably correct as always, settled his shoulders inside

his coat, and took his stick in his right hand again. Eleanor now looked

around at him.

"Wait two minutes," she said, "if you don't mind." Then, to Rodney,

"Come along." And she led the way up the lustrous, velvety teakwood

stair.

He followed her. But arrived at the drawing-room floor, he protested.

"Look here!" he said. "If Jim's busy ..."

"You've never been in here before, have you?" she asked. "How's Rose?

Jim saw her, you know, in New York."

"Yes," he said. "Rose wrote to me she'd seen him, and I thought I'd drop

around for a chat. But if he's busy ..."

"Oh, don't be _too_ dense, Rodney!" she said. "A man has to be busy when

he's known to be in the house and won't entertain his wife's guests. Go

up one flight more and to the door that corresponds to that one. It

won't do you any good to knock. He'll either not answer or else tell you

to go to hell. Just sing out who you are and go right in."

She gave him a nod and a hard little smile, and went down-stairs again

to Bertie.

Rodney stood where she had left him, in two minds whether to carry out

her instructions or to wait until he heard her and Bertie go out and

then quietly follow them. It was a beastly situation, dragged into a

family quarrel like that; forced to commit an intrusion that was so

plainly labeled in advance. And on the other hand, it was a decidedly

interesting situation. If Eleanor was as reckless as that with facts

most women keep to themselves as long as possible, what would her

outspoken husband be. But if he were full of his grievances, he probably

wouldn't talk about Rose.

What really determined his action was Eleanor's discovery, or pretended

discovery down in the hall below, that her gloves weren't what she

wanted and her instructions to the maid to go up and get her a fresh

pair. It would be too ridiculous to be caught there--lurking.

So he mounted the next flight, found the door Eleanor had indicated,

knocked smartly on it, and to forestall his getting told to go to hell,

sang out at the same time, "This is Rodney Aldrich. May I come in?"

"Come in, of course," Randolph called. "I'm glad to see you," he added,

coming to meet his guest. "But do you mind telling me how the devil you

got in here? Some poor wretch will lose his job, you know, if Eleanor

finds out about this. When I'm in this room, sacred to reflection and

research, it's a first-class crime to let me be disturbed."

It didn't need his sardonic grin to point the satire of his words. The

way he had uttered "sacred to reflection and research," was positively

savage.

Rodney said curtly, "Eleanor sent me up herself. I didn't much want to

come, to tell the truth, when I heard you were busy."

"Eleanor!" her husband repeated. "I thought she'd gone out--with her

poodle."

Rodney said, with unconcealed distaste, "They were on the point of going

out when I came in. That's how Eleanor happened to see me."

With a visible effort, Randolph recovered a more normal manner. "I'm

glad it happened that way," he said. "Get yourself a drink. You'll find

anything you want over there, I guess, and something to smoke; then

we'll sit down and have an old-fashioned talk."

The source of drinks he indicated was a well-stocked cellarette at the

other side of the room. But Rodney's eye fell first on a decanter and

siphon on the table, within reach of the chair Randolph had been sitting

in. His host's glance followed his.

"This is Bourbon I've got over here," he added. "I suppose you prefer

Scotch."

"I don't believe I want anything more to drink just now," Rodney said.

And as he turned to the smoking table to get a cigar, Randolph allowed

himself another sardonic grin.

The preliminaries were gone through rather elaborately; chairs drawn up

and adjusted, ash-trays put within reach; cigars got going

satisfactorily. But the talk they were supposed to prepare the way for

didn't at once begin.

Randolph took another stiffish drink and settled back into a dull

sullen abstraction.

Rodney wanted to say, "I hear from Rose you had a little visit with her

in New York." But, with his host's mood what it was, he shrank from

introducing that topic. Finally, for the sake of saying something, he

remarked:

"This is a wonderful room, isn't it?"

Randolph roused himself. "Never been in here before?" he asked.

"I've never been in the house before, I'm ashamed to say."

"What!" Randolph cried. "My God! Well, then, come along."

Rodney resisted a little. He was comfortable. They could look over the

house later. But Randolph wouldn't listen.

"That's the first thing to do," he insisted. "Indispensable preliminary.

You can't enjoy the opera without a libretto. Come along."

It was a remarkable house. Before the first fifteen minutes of their

inspection were over, Rodney had come to the conclusion that though

Bertie Willis might be an ass, was indeed an indisputable ass, he was no

fool. It was almost uncannily clever, the way all the latest devices for

modern comfort wore, so demurely, the mask of a perfectly consistent

medievalism. And there were some effects that were really magnificent.

The view of the drawing-room, for instance, from the recessed dais at

the far end of it, where the grand piano stood--a piano that contrived

to look as if it might have been played upon by the second wife of Henry

VIII,--down toward the magnificent stone chimney at the other; the

octagonal dining-room with the mysterious audacity of its lighting; the

kitchen with its flag floor (only they were not flags, but an artful

linoleum), its great wrought-iron chains and hoods beneath which all the

cooking was done--by electricity.

Randolph took him over the whole thing from bottom to top. Through it

all, he kept up the glib patter of a showman; the ironic intent of it

becoming more and more marked all the while.

They brought up at last in the study they had started from.

"Oh, but wait a moment!" Randolph said. "Here's two more rooms for you

to see."

The first one explained its purpose at a glance, with a desk and

typewriter, and filing cabinets around the walls.

"Rubber floor," Randolph pointed out, "felt ceiling; absolutely

sound-proof. Here's where my stenographer sits all day, ready,--like a

fireman. And this," he concluded, leading the way to the other room, "is

the holy of holies."

It had a rubber floor, too, and Rodney supposed, a felt ceiling. But its

only furniture was one straight-back chair and a canvas cot.

"Sound-proof too," said Randolph. "But sounding-boards or something in

all the walls. I press this button, start a dictaphone, and talk in any

direction, anywhere. It's all taken down. Here's where I'm supposed to

think, make discoveries, and things. No distractions. One hundred per

cent. efficient. My God! I tried it for a while. Felt like a fool actor

in a Belasco play. Do you remember? The one with the laboratory and the

doctor?"

They went back into the study.

"Clever beasts, though--poodles," he remarked, as he nodded Rodney to

his chair and poured himself another drink. "Learn their tricks very

nicely. But good Heavens, Aldrich, think of him as a man! Think what our

American married women are up against, when they want somebody to play

off against their husbands and have to fall back on tired little beasts

like that. In all the older countries there are plenty of men, real men

who've got something, that a married woman can fall back on. But think

of a woman of Eleanor's attractions having to take up a thing like that.

There's nothing else for her. Would _you_ come around and hold her hand

and make love to her, or any other man like you? Not once in a thousand

times. Eleanor doesn't mean anything. She's trying to make me jealous.

That's her newest experiment. But it's downright pitiful, I say."

Rodney got up out of his chair. It wasn't a possible conversation.

"I'll be running along, I think," he said. "I've a lot of proof to

correct to-night, and you've got work of your own, I expect."

"Sit down again," said Randolph sharply. "I'm just getting drunk. But

that can wait. I'm going to talk. I've got to talk. And if you go, I

swear I'll call up Eleanor's butler and talk to him. You'll keep it to

yourself, anyway."

He added, as Rodney hesitated, "I want to tell you about Rose. I saw her

in New York, you know."

Rodney sat down again. "Yes," he said, "so she wrote. Tell me how she

looked. She's been working tremendously hard, and I'm a little afraid

she's overdoing it."

"She looks," Randolph said very deliberately, "a thousand years old." He

laughed at the sharp contraction of Rodney's brows. "Oh, not like that!

She's as beautiful as ever. More. Facial planes just a hair's breadth

more defined perhaps--a bit more of what that painter Burton calls edge.

But not a line, not a mark. Her skin's still got that bloom on it, and

she still flushes up when she smiles. She's lost five pounds, perhaps,

but that's just condition. And vitality! My God!--But a thousand years

old just the same."

"I'd like to know what you mean by that," said Rodney. He added, "if you

mean anything," but the words were unspoken.

Randolph did mean something.

"Why, look here," he said. "You know what a kid she was when you married

her. Schoolgirl! I used to tell her things and she'd listen, all

eyes--holding her breath! Until I felt almost as wise as she thought I

was. She was always game, even then. If she started a thing, she saw it

through. If she said, 'Tell it to me straight,' why she took it,

whatever it might be, standing up. She wasn't afraid of anything.

Courage of innocence. Because she didn't know.

"Well, she's courageous now, because she knows. She's been through it

all and beaten it all, and she knows she can beat it again. She

understands--I tell you--everything.

"Why, look here! We all but ran into each other on the corner, there, of

Broadway and Forty-second Street; shook hands, said howdy-do. How long

was I here for? Was Eleanor with me? And so on. If I had a spare

half-hour, would I come in and have tea with her at the Knickerbocker?

She'd nodded at two or three passing people while we stood there. And

then somebody said, 'Hello, Dane,' and stopped. A miserable, shabby,

shivering little painted thing. Rose said, 'Hello,' and asked how she

was getting along. Was she working now? She said no; did Rose know of

anything? Rose said, 'Give me your address and if I can find anything,

I'll let you know.' The horrible little beast told where she lived and

went away. Rose didn't say anything to me, except that she was somebody

who'd been out in a road company with her. But there was a look in her

eyes ...! Oh, she knew--everything. Knew what that kid was headed for.

Knew there was nothing to be done about it. She had no flutters about

it, didn't pull a long face, didn't, as I told you, say a word. But

there was a look in her eyes, behind her eyes, somehow, that understood

and _faced_--God!--everything. And then we went in and had our tea.

"I had a thousand curiosities about her. I'd have found out anything I

could. But it was she who did the finding out. Beyond inquiring about

you, how lately I'd seen you, and so on, she hardly asked a question;

talked about indifferent things: New York, the theaters, how we passed

the time out here, I don't know what. But pretty soon I saw that she

understood me, saw right into me like through an open window into a

lighted room. As easily as that. She knew what was the matter with me;

knew what I'd made of myself. And by God, Aldrich, she didn't even

despise me!

"I came back here to kick this damned thing to pieces, give myself a

fresh start. And when I got here, I hadn't the sand. I get drunk

instead."

He poured himself another long drink and sipped it slowly. "Everybody

knows," he said at last, "that prostitutes almost invariably take to

drugs or drink. But I know why they do."

That remark stung Rodney out of his long silence. During the whole of

Randolph's recital of his encounter with Rose, he'd never once lifted

his eyes from the gray ash of his cigar, and the violet filament of

smoke that arose from it. He didn't want to look at Randolph, nor think

about him. Just wanted to remember every word he said, so that he could

carry the picture away intact. Now that the picture was finished, he

wanted to get out of that room, with it; out into the dark and

loneliness of the streets, where he could walk and think.

There was something peculiarly horrifying to him in the exhibition

Randolph was making of himself. He'd never in his life taken a drink,

except convivially, and then he took as little as would pass muster.

He'd always found it hard to be sensibly tolerant of the things men said

and did in liquor, even when their condition had overtaken them

unawares. Going off alone and deliberately fuddling one's self as a

means of escaping unpleasant realities, struck him as an act of the

basest cowardice. Whether Randolph's revelation of himself were true or

distorted by alcohol, didn't seem much to matter. But for that picture

of Rose, he'd have gone long ago and left the man to his bemused

reflections. Only ...

He'd said that Rose understood everything and didn't despise him. A

drunken fancy likely enough. She had seen something though. Her letter

proved that. And having seen it, she'd asked him to drop in on the

doctor for a visit. Did she mean she wanted him to try to help?

He tried, though not very successfully, to conceal his violent disrelish

of the task, when he said:

"Look here, Jim! What the devil is the matter with you? Are you sober

enough to tell me?"

Randolph put down his glass. "I have told you," he said. "It's a thing

that can be told in one word. I'm a prostitute. I'm Eleanor's kept man.

Well kept, oh, yes. Beautifully kept. I'm nothing in God's world but a

possession of hers! A trophy of sorts, an ornament. I'm something she's

made. I have a hell of a big practise. I'm the most fashionable doctor

in Chicago. They come here, the women, damn them, in shoals. That's

Eleanor's doing. I'm a faker, a fraud, a damned actor. I pose for them.

I play up. I give them what they want. And that's her doing. They go

silly about me; fancy they're in love with me. That's what she wants

them to do. It increases my value for her as a possession.

"I haven't done a lick of honest work in the last year. I can't work.

She won't let me work. She--smothers me. Wherever I turn, there she is,

smoothing things out, trying to making it easy, trying to anticipate my

wants. I've only one want. That's to be let alone. She can't do that.

She's insatiable. She can't help it. There's something drives her on so

that she never can feel sure that she possesses me completely enough.

There's always something more she's trying to get, and I'm always trying

to keep something away from her, and failing.

"And why? Do you want to know why, Aldrich? That's the cream of the

thing. Because we're so damnably in love with each other. She wants me

to live on her love. To have nothing else to live on. Do you know why

she won't have any children? Because she's jealous of them. Afraid

they'd get between us. She tries to make me jealous with that poodle of

hers--and she succeeds. With that! I'd like to wring his neck.

"Do you want to know what my notion of Heaven is? It would be to go off

alone, with one suit of clothes in a handbag, oh, and fifty or a hundred

dollars in my pocket--I wouldn't mind that; I don't want to be a

tramp--to some mining town, or mill town, or slum, where I could start a

general practise; where the things I'd get would be accident cases,

confinement cases; real things, urgent things, that night and day are

all alike to. I'd like to start again and be poor; get this stink of

easy money out of my nostrils. I'd like to see if I could make good on

my own; have something I could look at and say, 'That's mine. I did

that. I had to sweat for it.'

"I've been thinking about that for two years. It makes quite a

fancy-picture. There are a million details I can fill into it. A rotten

little office over a drug-store somewhere; people coming in with real

ills, and I curing them up and charging them a dollar, and sending them

away happy. I smoke a pipe because I can't afford cigars; get my meals

at lunch-counters. I sit up here--in this room--and think about it.

"I came back from New York, after that look at Rose, meaning to do it;

meaning to talk it out with Eleanor and tell her why, and then go.

Well, I talked. Talk's cheap. But I didn't go. I'll never go. I'll go on

getting softer and more of a fake; more dependent. And Eleanor will go

on eating me up, until the last thing in me that's me myself, is gone.

And then, some day, she'll look at me and see that I'm nothing. That I

have nothing left to love her with."

Then, with suddenly thickened speech (an affectation, perhaps) he looked

up at Rodney and demanded:

"What the hell are you looking so s-solemn about? Can't you take a joke?

Come along and have another drink. The night's young."

"No," Rodney said, "I'm going. And you'd better get to bed."

"A couple more drinks," Randolph said, "to put the cap on a jolly

evening. Always get drunk th-thoroughly. Then in the morning, you wake

up a wiser man. Wise enough to forget what a damned fool you've been.

You don't want to forget that, Aldrich. You've been drunk and you've

talked like a damned fool. And I've been drunk and I've talked like a

damned fool. But we'll both be wiser in the morning."

Rodney walked home that night like a man dazed. The vividness of one

blazing idea blinded him. The thing that Randolph had seen and lacked

the courage to do; the thing Rodney despised him for a coward for having

failed to do, that thing Rose had done. Line by line, the parallel

presented itself to him, as the design comes through in a half-developed

photographic plate.

Without knowing it, yielding to a blind, unscrutinized instinct, he'd

wanted Rose to live on his love. He'd tried to smooth things out for

her, anticipate her wants. He'd wanted her soft, helpless, dependent. As

a trophy? That was what Randolph had said. Had he been as bad as that?

From what other desire of his than that could have come the sting of

exasperation he'd always felt when she'd urged him to let her work for

him; help him to economize, dust and make beds, so that he could go on

writing his book? She'd seen, even then, something he'd been blind

to--something he'd blinded himself to; that love, by itself, was not

enough. That it could poison, as well as feed.

And, seeing, she had the courage ... He pressed his hands against his

eyes.

When there could be friendship as well as love between them, she said,

she'd come back. Would she come back now, even for his friendship? He

doubted it. Dared not hope. There came up before him that face of frozen

agony that had confronted him in the room on Clark Street, and he

remembered what she'd said then--with a shudder--about it all ending

"like this." Ending!

His love had played her false; had tried, instinctively, to smother her,

and defeated at that, had outraged and tortured her. She couldn't

possibly look at it any way but that. And now that she was free,

self-discovered, victorious, was it likely she would submit to its blind

caprices again? The thing Randolph had said was his notion of Heaven,

she'd triumphantly attained. Wouldn't it be her notion of Heaven too?

But she had won, among the rest of her spoils of victory, the thing she

had originally set out to get. His friendship and respect. Friendship,

he remembered her saying, was a thing you had to earn. When you'd earned

it, it couldn't be withheld from you. Well, it was right she should be

told that; made to understand it to the full. He couldn't ask her to

come back to him. But she must know that her respect was as necessary

now to him, as she'd once said his was to her. He must tell her that. He

must see her and tell her that.

He stopped abruptly in his walk. His bones, as the Psalmist said, turned

to water. How should he confront that gaze of hers, which knew so much

and understood so deeply--he with the memory of his two last ignominious

encounters with her, behind him?

CHAPTER III

FRIENDS

Except for the vacuum where the core and heart of it all ought to have

been, Rose's life in New York during the year that put her on the high

road to success as a designer of costumes for the theater, was a good

life, broadening, stimulating, seasoning. It rested, to begin with, on a

foundation of adequate material comfort which the unwonted physical

privations of the six months that preceded it--the room on Clark Street,

the nightmare tour on the road, and even the little back room in Miss

Gibbons' apartment over the drug-store in Centropolis--made seem like

positive luxury.

After a preliminary fortnight in a little hotel off Washington Square,

which she had heard Jane Lake speak of once as a possible place for a

respectable young woman of modest means to live in, she found an

apartment in Thirteenth Street, not far west of Sixth Avenue. It was in

a quiet block of old private residences. But this building was clean and

new, with plenty of white tile and modern plumbing, and an elevator. Her

apartment had two rooms in it, one of them really spacious to poor Rose

after what she'd been taking for granted lately, besides a nice white

bathroom and a kitchenette. She paid thirty-seven dollars a month for

it, and five dollars a month for a share in a charwoman who came in

every day and made her bed and washed up dishes.

The extensiveness of this domestic establishment frightened her a little

at first. But she reassured herself with the reflection that under the

rule Gertrude Morse had quoted to her, one week's pay for one month's

rent, she still had a comfortable margin. She furnished it a bit at a

time, with articles chosen in the order of their indispensability, and

she went on, during the summer, to buy some things which were not

indispensable at all. But not very many. Like most persons with a highly

specialized creative talent for one form of beauty (in her case this was

clothes) she was more or less indifferent about others. Witness how

little interest she had taken in the labored beauties of Florence

McCrea's house, even in the unthinking days before she had begun

worrying about the expense of that establishment. Her indifference had

always made Portia boil. Also it may be noted, that Florence McCrea

herself, always went about looking a perfect frump.

So that, by the time Rose's apartment was furnished to the point of

adequate comfort and decency, she took it for granted and stopped there.

For her, the temptations of old brass, mezzo-tints, and Italian

majolica--Fourth Avenue generally--simply did not exist.

She bought real china to eat her breakfasts out of, and the occasional

suppers she had at home. She had had enough of thick cups and plates in

the last six months to last her the rest of her life. And it is probable

that she ate up, literally, the margin she had under Gertrude Morse's

rule, in somewhat better restaurants than she need have patronized.

She did save money though, and put it away in a safe bank. But she never

saved quite so much as she was always meaning to, and she carried along,

for months after she went to work for Galbraith, an almost guilty sense

of luxury. In spite of the fact that she was working very hard and of

the further fact that her hours of labor were largely coincident with

the leisure hours of other people, she made a good many friends. The

first of these was Gertrude Morse, and it was through her, directly or

indirectly, that she acquired the others.

Gertrude was Abe Shuman's confidential secretary and you can get a

fairly good working notion of her by conceiving the type of person

likely to be found in the borderland of theatrical enterprises, and

then, in all respects, taking the exact antithesis of it. She was a

brisk, prim-mannered, snub-nosed little thing, who wore her hair brushed

down as flat as possible and showed an affection for mannish clothes.

She had a level head, a keen and rather biting wit, which had the

effect of making her constant acts of kindness always unexpected; and

an education which, in her surroundings, seemed almost fantastic. She

was a Radcliff Master of Arts.

Every one who had any dealings with Abe Shuman perforce knew Gertrude,

and Rose got acquainted with her the first day. Galbraith introduced

them in Shuman's office, and Rose found herself being investigated by a

bright, penetrating and decidedly complex look which she

interpreted--pretty accurately as she found out later--as saying, "Well,

you're about what I expected; ornamental and enthusiastic; just what an

otherwise sane and successful man of fifty would pick out for an

'assistant.' Aren't they just children at that age! But you're welcome.

They deserve it. Good luck to you!"

But when Rose returned the look with a comprehending smile which said

good-naturedly, "All right! You wait and see," Gertrude's expression

altered into a frankly questioning frown. Two or three days later she

dropped in at a rehearsal, ostensibly with a message from Shuman to

Galbraith. He was on the point of leaving and had turned over the

rehearsal to Rose. Gertrude, when he had gone, settled down comfortably

in the back of the auditorium and watched through a solid hour,

obviously under instructions from Abe to bring back a report as to

whether Galbraith's infatuation should be tolerated or suppressed. At

the end of the hour, during a brief lull in the rehearsal, she came down

the aisle and stopped beside Rose who still had her eye on the stage.

"I apologize," she said.

Rose grinned around at her. It was not necessary to ask what for. "Much

obliged," she said.

"I didn't know that a woman could do that," Gertrude went on. "Didn't

think she'd have the--drive. But you've got it, all right. I don't

suppose you've got an idea when you'll be free for lunch?"

Rose hadn't, but it was not many days before they got together for that

meal at a business woman's club down on Fortieth Street, and from then

on their acquaintance progressed rapidly. She helped Rose find the

little apartment on Thirteenth Street, entertaining her during the

search with a highly instructive disquisition on the social topography

of New York, and on the following Sunday she ran in, she said, to see if

she could help her get settled. There was no settling to do, but she sat

down and talked--most of the time--for an hour or so. It was a theory of

Gertrude's that the way to find out about people was to talk to them.

"You can't tell much," she used to say, "by the things people say to

you. Perhaps they've just heard somebody else say them. Maybe they've

got a repertory that it will take you weeks to get to the end of. Or

they may not be able to show you at all what's really inside them. But

from how they take the things you say to them--the things they light up

at and the things they look blank about, the things they're too anxious

to show you they understand, and the things they dare admit they never

heard of--you can tell every time. Find out all you want to know about

anybody in an hour!"

Rose, it seemed, reacted satisfactorily to her tests, since she was

introduced as rapidly thereafter as their scanty leisure made possible,

to Gertrude's more immediate circle of friends.

During that first winter, she enjoyed them immensely. They were all

interesting; all "did things"; widely various things, yet, somehow,

related. There was a red-haired fire-brand whose specialty seemed to be

bailing out girls arrested for picketing and whose Sunday diversion

consisted in going down to Paterson, New Jersey, making the police

ridiculous and unhappy for an hour or so, delivering herself of a speech

in defiance of their preventive efforts and finally escaping arrest by a

hair's breadth. They got her finally but since she enjoyed the privilege

of addressing as Uncle a man whose name was uttered with awe about the

corner of Broad Street and Exchange Place, they had to let her go.

There was a young woman lawyer, associated with Gertrude in an

organization for getting jobs for girls who had just been let out of

jail, a level-headed enterprise, which by conserving its efforts for

those who really wished to benefit by them, managed to accomplish a good

deal. One of their circle was associate editor of a popular magazine and

another wrote short stories, mostly about shop-girls. The last one of

them for Rose to meet, she having been out of town all summer, was

Alice Perosini. She was the daughter of a rich Italian Jew, a

beautiful--really a wonderful person to look at--but a little

unaccountable, especially with the gorgeous clothes she wore, in their

circle. Rose took her time about deciding that she liked her but ended

by preferring her to all the rest. She never talked much; would smoke

and listen, making most of her comments in pantomime, but she had a

trick of capping a voluble discussion with a hard-chiseled phrase which,

whether you felt it precisely fitted or not, you found it difficult to

escape from.

What forced Rose to a realization of her preference for Alice was the

impulse to tell her who she really was and the suddenly following

reflection that she never had wanted to tell any of the others; that she

had taken care to avoid all reference to the husband and the babies she

had fled from in search of a life of her own.

She never tried to explain to herself the feeling that imposed this

reticence on her, until the discovery that it didn't exist toward Alice.

She couldn't have feared that they would not approve of what she had

done; it squared so exactly with all their ideas. Indeed the one real

bond between them was a common revolt against the traditional notion

that the way for a woman to effect her will in the world was by

"influencing" a man. They wanted to hold the world in their own hands.

They contemned the "feminine" arts of cajolery. They wanted no odds from

anybody. There wasn't a real man-hater in the crowd, they were too

normal and healthy for that. But they didn't talk much about men; never,

as far as Rose knew, about men--as such. Was the topic suppressed, she

wondered, or was it just that they didn't think about them?

That question made her realize how little she knew of any of them; how

limited was the range of their intercourse. It was as if they met in a

sort of mental gymnasium, fenced with one another, did callisthenics.

Oh, that was going too far, of course; it was more real than that. But

it was true that it was only their minds that met. And it seemed to be

true that in the realm of mind they were content to live. Had they,

like herself, deep labyrinthine, half-lit caverns down underneath those

north-lighted, logically ordered apartments where Rose always found

them? If they had they never let her or one another suspect it.

They'd be capable of deciding the great issue between herself and

Rodney, if ever they were told the story, in a half dozen brisk

sentences. Rose would be held to have been right and Rodney wrong,

demonstrably. Rose, illogically, perhaps, shrank from that conclusion or

at least from having it reached that way. There was more to it than

that. There were elements in the situation they wouldn't know how to

allow for.

But Alice Perosini, she thought, was different. She'd be able to make

some of those allowances. Rose didn't tell her the story but she felt

that at a pinch she could and this feeling was enough to establish Alice

on a different basis from the others. It was with Alice that she

discussed the more personal sort of problems that arose in connection

with her new job. (One of these, as you are to be told, was highly

personal.) And when the question came up of finding the capital that

would enable her to make the Shumans a bid on all the costumes for _Come

On In_ it was Alice, who, with all the sang-froid in the world, sketched

out the articles of partnership and brought her in a certified check for

three thousand dollars.

The fact that they had become partners served, somehow, to divert a

relation between them which might otherwise have developed into a

first-class friendship. Not that they quarreled or even disappointed

each other in the close contacts of the day's work. They were admirably

complementary. Alice had the business acumen, the executive grasp, the

patient willingness to master details, which were needed to set Rose

free for the more imaginative part of the enterprise. Both were

immensely determined on success. Alice couldn't have been keener about

it if every cent she had in the world had been embarked in the business.

But at the end of the day's work they tended to fly apart rather than to

stick together. Both were charged with the same kind of static

electricity. It was an instinct they were sensible enough to follow.

Both realized that they were more efficient as partners from not going

too intimately into each other's outside affairs.

But when the winter had passed and the early spring had brought its

triumph, with the success of her costumes in _Come On In_, and when the

inevitable reaction from the burst of energy that had won that triumph

had taken possession of her, Rose found herself in need of a friendship

that would grip deeper, understand more. And with the realization of the

need of it she found she had it. It was a friendship that had grown in

the unlikeliest soil in the world, the friendship of a man who had

wanted to be her lover. The man was John Galbraith.

For the first month after she came to New York to work for him she had

found Galbraith a martinet. She never once caught that twinkling gleam

of understanding in his eye that had meant so much to her during the

rehearsals of _The Girl Up-stairs_. His manner toward her carried out

the tone of the letter she'd got from him in Centropolis. It was stiff,

formal, severe. He seldom praised her work and never ungrudgingly. His

censure was rare too, to be sure, but this obviously was because Rose

almost never gave him an excuse for it. Of course she was up to her

work, but, well, she had better be. This, in a nutshell, was his

attitude toward her. Nothing but the undisputable fact that she was up

to her work (Gertrude was comforting here, with her reticent but

convincing reports of Abe Shuman's satisfaction with her) kept Rose from

losing confidence. Even as it was, working for Galbraith in this mood

gave her the uneasy sensation one experiences when walking abroad under

a sultry overcast sky with mutterings and flashes in it. And then one

night the storm broke.

They had lingered in the theater after the dismissal of a rehearsal, to

talk over a change in one of the numbers Rose had been working on. It

refused to come out satisfactorily. Rose thought she saw a way of doing

it that would work better and she had been telling him about it.

Eagerly, at first, and with a limpid directness which, however, became

clouded and troubled when she felt he wasn't paying attention. It was a

difficulty with him she had encountered before. Some strong

preoccupation she could neither guess the nature of nor lure him away

from.

But to-night after an angry turn down the aisle and back he suddenly

cried out, "I don't know. I don't know what you've been talking about. I

don't know and I don't care." And then confronting her, their faces not

a foot apart, for by now she had got to her feet, his hands gripped

together and shaking, his teeth clenched, his eyes glowing there in the

half-light of the auditorium, almost like an animal's, he demanded,

"Can't you see what's the matter with me? Haven't you seen it yet? My

God!"

Of course she saw it now, plainly enough. She sat down again, managing

an air of deliberation about it, and gripped the back of the orchestra

chair in front of her. He remained standing over her there in the aisle.

When the heightening tension of the silence that followed this outburst

had grown absolutely unendurable she spoke. But the only thing she could

find to say was almost ludicrously inadequate.

"No, I didn't see it until now. I'm sorry."

"You didn't see it," he echoed. "I know you didn't. You've never seen me

at all, from the beginning, as anything but a machine. But why haven't

you? You're a woman. If I ever saw a woman in my life you're one all the

way through. Why couldn't you see that I was a man? It isn't because

I've got gray hair, nor because I'm fifty years old. You aren't like

that. I don't believe you're like that. But even back there in Chicago,

the night we walked down the avenue from Lessing's store--or the night

we had supper together after the show...."

"I suppose I ought to have seen," she said dully. "Ought to have known

that that was all there was to it. That there couldn't be anything else

in the world. But I didn't."

"Well, you see it now," he said savagely fairly, and strode away up the

aisle and then back to her. He sat down in the seat in front of her and

turned around. "I want to see your face," he said. "There's something

I've got to know. Something you've got to tell me. You said once, back

there in Chicago, that there was only one person who really mattered to

you. I want to know who that one person is. What he is. Whether he's

still the one person who really matters. If he isn't I'll take my

chance. I'll make you love me if it's the last thing I ever do in the

world."

Remembering the scene afterward Rose was a little surprised that she'd

been able to answer him as she did, without a hesitation or a stammer,

and with a straight gaze that held his until she had finished.

"The only person in the world," she said, "who ever has mattered to me,

or ever will matter, is my husband. I fell in love with him the day I

met him. I was in love with him when I left him. I'm in love with him

now. Everything I do that's any good is just something he might be proud

of if he knew it. And every failure is just something I hope I could

make him understand and not despise me for. It's months since I've seen

him but there isn't a day, there isn't an hour in a day, when I don't

think about him and--want him. I don't know whether I'll ever see him

again but if I don't it won't make any difference with that. That's why

I didn't see what I might have seen about you. It wasn't possible for me

to see. I'd never have seen it if you hadn't told me in so many words,

like this. Do you see now?"

He turned away from her with a nod and put his hands to his face. She

waited a moment to see whether he had anything else to say, for the

habit of waiting for his dismissal was too strong to be broken even in a

situation like this. But finding that he hadn't she rose and walked out

of the theater.

There was an hour after she had gained the haven of her own apartment,

when she pretty well went to pieces. So this was all, was it, that she

owed her illusory appearance of success to? The amorous desires of a man

old enough to be her father! Once more, she blissfully and ignorantly

unsuspecting all the while, it was love that had made her world go

round. The same long-circuited sex attraction that James Randolph long

ago had told her about. But for that attraction she'd never have got

this job in New York, never have had the chance to design those costumes

for Goldsmith and Block. Never, in all probability, have got even that

job in the chorus of _The Girl Up-stairs_. All she'd accomplished in

that bitter year since she left Rodney had been to make another man fall

in love with her!

But she didn't let herself go like that for long. The situation was too

serious for the indulgence of an emotional sprawl. Here she was in an

apartment that cost her thirty-seven dollars a month. She'd got to earn

a minimum of thirty dollars a week to keep on with it. Of course she

couldn't go on working for Galbraith. The question was, what could she

do? Well, she could do a good many things. Whatever Galbraith's motives

had been in giving her her chance, she had taken that chance and made

the most of it. Gertrude Morse knew what she could do. For that matter,

so did Abe Shuman himself. The thing to do now was to go to bed and get

a night's sleep and confront the situation with a clear mind in the

morning.

It was a pretty good indication of the way she had grown during the last

year that she was able to conquer the shuddering revulsion that had at

first swept over her, get herself in hand again, eat a sandwich and

drink a glass of milk, re-read a half dozen chapters of Albert Edwards'

_A Man's World_, and then put out her light and sleep till morning.

It was barely nine o'clock when Galbraith called her up on the

telephone. She hadn't had her breakfast yet and had not even begun to

think out what the day's program must be.

He apologized for calling her so early. "I wanted to be sure of catching

you," he said, "before you did anything. You haven't yet, have you? Not

written to Shuman throwing up your job, or anything like that?"

Even over the telephone his manner was eloquent with relief when she

told him she had not. "I want to talk with you," he said. "It's got to

be somewhere where we won't be interrupted." He added, "I shan't say

again what I said last night. You'll find me perfectly reasonable."

Somehow his voice carried entire conviction. The man she visualized at

the other telephone was neither the distracted pleader she had left last

night, nor the martinet she had been working for during the last month

here in New York, but the John Galbraith she had known in Chicago.

"All right," she said, "I don't know any better place than here in my

apartment, if that's convenient for you."

"Yes," he said, "that's all right. When may I come? The sooner the

better of course."

"Can you give me an hour?" she asked, and he said he could.

It occurred to her, as the moment of his arrival drew near, that she

might better have thought twice before appointing their meeting here in

her apartment. Discretion perhaps would have suggested a more neutral

rendezvous. But she didn't take this consideration very seriously and

with the first real look she got into his face after she had let him in,

she dismissed it utterly. They shook hands and said, "Good morning," and

she asked him to sit down, all as if nothing had happened the night

before. But he wasted no time in getting to the point.

"There's one idea you'll have got, from what I said last night, that's a

mistake and that's got to be set right before we go any further. That

is, that you owe your position here, as my assistant, to the fact that

I'd fallen in love with you. That's not true. In fact, it's the opposite

of the truth. That feeling of mine has worked against you instead of for

you. I'll have to explain that a little to make you understand it. And

if you won't mind I'll have to talk pretty straight." She gave him a nod

of assent, but he did not immediately go on. It was a reflective pause,

not an embarrassed one.

"I've always despised;" he said, "a man who mixed up his love-affairs

with his business. In my business, perhaps, there's a certain temptation

to do that and I've always been on guard against it. I've had

love-affairs, more or less, all along. But in my vacations. You can't do

decent honest work when your mind's on that sort of thing, and I care

more about my work than anything else.

"Well, that night in Chicago, after the opening of _The Girl

Up-stairs_, when I took you out to supper, I didn't know what I wanted.

That's the truth. I'd been fighting my interest in you, my personal

interest that is, calling myself all kinds of an old fool. I'd never had

a thing get me like that before and I didn't know what to make of it.

Well, the business was over, of course. I was entitled to a little

vacation. I suppose, that night, if you'd shown the least sense of how I

felt, even if it was just by seeming frightened, I might have flared up

and made love to you. But you didn't see it at all. You had some sort

of--fence around you that held me off. And for a while you even made me

forget that I was in love with you. Forget that you were anything but

the cleverest person I had known at catching my ideas and putting them

over. I saw how enormously valuable you'd be to me, in this job you've

got now, and I offered it to you.

"And then, all in a wave the other feeling came back. On my way to New

York I decided that as long as I felt like that I'd have nothing more to

do with you. A man couldn't possibly do any decent work with a woman he

was in love with, either after he'd got her or while he was trying to

get her. That's why you didn't hear from me within a month after I'd got

back to New York. But as time went on I forgot how strong my feeling had

been. I decided. I'd got over it. I'd been looking for some one else to

take the place I'd designed for you and I couldn't find anybody.

"I might have got a man, but I didn't want a man, because if he were

clever enough to be any good he'd be out after my job from the very

first day. It would suit Abe Shuman down to the ground to have me teach

a man all I know in two years and then put him in my place at half my

pay. As for women, well, I've never seen a woman yet with just your

combination of qualities, your drive and your knack. So I persuaded

myself that it would be all right. That I could get along without

thinking about you the other way. And I sent for you.

"But the minute I saw you I knew I'd have to look out. I've tried to;

you know that. I've been treating you like a sweep since you've been

down here. I didn't mean to but I couldn't help it. I was in such a

rage with myself for going on like a sentimental fool about you. And the

way you took it, always good-humored and never afraid, made me all the

more ashamed of myself and all the more in love with you. And so last

night I burst. In a way I'm glad I did. I think perhaps it will clear

the air. But I'll come to that later. I want to know now whether you're

convinced that what I said is true. That the fact that I fell in love

with you has been against you and not in your favor."

"Yes," Rose said, "I'm convinced of that and I want to thank you for

telling me. Because the other feeling was pretty--discouraging."

"All right," he said with a nod, "that's understood. Now, here's my

proposition. That you go on working for me exactly as if nothing had

happened."

"Oh, but that's impossible!" she said, and when he put in "Why is it?"

she told him he had just said so himself. That it was impossible for a

man to do decent work with a woman he was in love with.

"That's what I thought last night when I blew up," he admitted, "but

I've got things a bit straighter since. In the first place, we have been

doing decent work all this last month. We've been doing, between us, the

work of two high-priced directors."

She said, "Yes, but I didn't know ..."

"Understanding's better than ignorance," he interrupted, "any time.

Between people of sense, that is. We'd get on better together, not

worse. Look at us now. We're talking together sensibly enough, aren't

we? And we're here in your sitting-room, talking about the fact that I

fell in love with you. Couldn't we talk just as sensibly in the theater,

about whether a song or number was in the right place or not? Of course

we could."

The truth of this argument rather stumped Rose. It didn't seem

reasonable, but it was true. Instead of embarrassing and distressing

her, this talk with Galbraith was doing her good, restoring her

confidence. The air between them was easier to breathe than it had been

for weeks.

"You seem different this morning, somehow," she said.

"Why," he told her, "I am different. Permanently different toward you. I

am convinced of it. I don't pretend to understand it myself, but

somehow--I'm relieved. For one thing, I never wanted to fall in love

with you. It was quite against my will that I did it. And then I've

always been tortured with curiosity about you. I've wondered. Were you

as unconscious of me as you seemed? Was it possible that you didn't

know. And if you did know, was it possible that you were--waiting? That

it only needed a word of mine to put everything between us on a

different basis? I couldn't get rid of that idea. It kept nagging at me.

But after what you told me last night--and you certainly told it

straight--that idea's exploded. What you said explains everything about

you. I know now that I haven't a chance in the world. From now on, I

imagine, I'll be able to treat you like a human being. Well, are you

willing to try it?"

Up to now they'd been sitting quietly in their two chairs with most of

the width of the room between them. But at this last question of his she

got up and walked over to the window.

"I don't know," she said at last. "It seems dangerous, somehow; like

courting trouble. I know ..." She hesitated, but then decided to say

what was in her mind. "I know how terribly strong those feelings are and

I've found out how little they've got to do with what it's so easy to

decide is reasonable." Now she turned and faced him.

"Don't you think it would be more sensible for me to find another job?

So that we could--well, take a fresh start?"

"Child," he said, "don't you know there's no such thing in the world as

a fresh start? Or a new leaf? That's a comfortable delusion for cowards.

The situation's in a mess, is it? All right, run away. Begin again with

a clean slate. But the first thing written down on that slate is that

you've just run away. Besides, suppose you do get another job, working,

say, for another director. How do you know that he won't fall in love

with you?"

That last sentence went by unheard. She was staring at him, almost in

consternation. "That's true," she said. "That's perfectly true. That

about running away. I--I never thought of it before." She went back to

her chair and dropped into it rather limply. She sat there through a

long silence, still thinking over his words and apparently almost

frightened over her own implications from them.

At last he said, "You've no cause for worry over that, I should think. I

don't believe you've ever run away from anything yet."

"I don't know," she answered thoughtfully. "I don't know whether I did

or not."

"Well," he came out at last, getting to his feet, "how about it? What

shall we do this time? Shall we tackle the situation and try to make the

best of it, or ..."

"Yes, that's what we'll do," she said. "And, well, I'm much obliged to

you for putting me right."

"I made all the trouble in the first place," said Galbraith, with a

rueful sort of grin. "It was up to me to think of something."

And after the elevator she'd escorted him to had carried him down, she

stood there in the hallway smiling, with the glow of a quite new

friendliness for him warming her heart.

It was natural, of course, that the relation between them after that day

should not prove quite so simple and manageable a thing as it had looked

that morning. There were breathless days when the storm visibly hung in

the sky; there were strained, stiff, self-conscious moments of rigidly

enforced politeness. Things got said despite his resolute repression

that had, as resolutely, to be ignored.

But in the intervals of these failures there emerged, and endured

unbroken for longer periods, the new thing they sought--genuine

friendliness, partnership.

It was just after Christmas that Abe Shuman took her away from him and

put her to work exclusively on costumes. And the swift sequence of

events within a month thereafter launched her in an independent

business; the new partnership with Alice Perosini, with the details of

which, through Jimmy Wallace, you are already sufficiently acquainted.

By the time that happened the friendship had gone so far that Rose's

chief reluctance in making the change sprang from a fear that the change

would interrupt it.

But the thing worked the other way. Released from the compulsory

relation of employer and employee, they frankly sought each other as

friends, and found that they got more out of a half-hour together over a

hasty lunch than a whole day's struggle over a common task had given

them.

There were long stretches of days, of course, when they saw nothing of

each other, and Rose, so long as she had plenty to do, was never

conscious of missing him. She never, in the course of her own day's

work, made an unconscious reference to him, as she was always making

them to Rodney. But the prospect of an empty Sunday morning, for

instance, was always enormously brightened if he called up to say that

it was empty for him, too, and shouldn't they go for a walk or a ferry

ride somewhere.

He did the greater part of the talking. Told her, a good deal to his own

surprise, stories of his early life in London--a chapter he'd never

been willing to refer to, except in the vaguest terms, to anybody else.

He told her, too, with more and more freedom and explicitness, as he

discovered how straight and honest her mind was, how eager it was for

facts instead of for sentimental refractions of them, about certain

emotional adventures of his as he was emerging into manhood, and of the

marks they had left on him.

All told, she learned more about men, as such, from him than ever she

had learned, consciously at least, from Rodney. She'd never been able to

regard her husband as a specimen. He was Rodney, _sui generis_, and it

had never occurred to her either to generalize from him to other men, or

to explain any of the facts she had noted about him, on the mere ground

of his masculinity. She began doing that now a little, and the exercise

opened her eyes.

In many ways Galbraith and her husband were a good deal alike. Both were

rough, direct, a little remorseless, and there was in both of them,

right alongside the best and finest and clearest things they had, an

unaccountable vein of childishness. She'd never been willing to call it

by that name in Rodney. But when she saw it in Galbraith, too, she

wondered. Was that just the man of it? Were they all like that; at least

all the best of them? Did a man, as long as he lived, need somebody in

the rôle of--mother? The thought all but suffocated her.

She did not return Galbraith's confidences with any detailed account of

her own life, and the one great emotional experience of it that seemed

to have absorbed all the rest and drawn it up into itself. But she had a

comforting sense that, scanty as was the framework of facts he had to go

on, he knew, somehow, all about it; all the essentials of it; knew

infinitely more about her than Alice Perosini did, although from time to

time she had told Alice a good deal.

Spring came on them with a rush that year; swept a vivid flush of green

over the parks and squares, all in a day; pumped the sap up madly into

the little buds, so that they could hardly swell fast enough, and burst

at last into a perfectly riotous fanfare through the shrubberies. It

pumped blood, too, as well as sap, and made hearts flutter to strange

irregular rhythms with the languorous insolence of its perfumes, and the

soft caressing pressures of its south wind.

It worried Rose nearly mad. She was bound to have gone slack anyway; to

have experienced the well-earned, honest lassitude of a finished

struggle and an achieved victory. Dane & Company had any amount of work

in sight, to be sure--a success of such triumphant proportions as they

had had with _Come On In_, made that inevitable--but it would be months

before any of the new work was wanted.

Alice, who could see plainly enough that something was the matter, kept

urging Rose to run away somewhere for a long vacation. Why not, if it

came to that, put in a few weeks in London and Paris? She was almost

sure to pick up some valuable ideas over there. Rose declined that

suggestion almost sharply. If she'd had any practical training as a

nurse, she'd go over to Paris and stay, but to use that magnificently

courageous tragic city as a source of ideas for a Shuman _revue_ was out

of the question. As for the quiet place in the Virginia mountains,

which Alice had suggested as an alternative, Rose would die of ennui

there within three days. The only thing to do was to stick to her

routine as well as she could, and worry along.

These weren't reasons that she gave Alice, they were excuses. The

reason, which she tried to avoid stating, even to herself, was that she

couldn't bear the thought of going one step farther away from Rodney

than she was already.

A letter from him was always in the first Saturday morning delivery and

she never left for her atelier till she got it. She had perceived, what

he had not, the steadily growing friendliness of these letters. It

wasn't a made-up thing, either. He was not telling her things because he

thought she'd like to be told, but because it had insensibly become a

need of his to tell her.

A year ago those letters would have made her wildly happy; would have

filled her with the confidence that the end she sought was in sight at

last. Now they drove her half mad with disappointment. She never opened

one of those dearly familiar envelopes without the irrepressible hope

that it contained a love-letter; a passionate demand that she come back

to him; leave all she had and come back to him; his woman to her man.

And her disappointment and inconsistency bewildered her.

Her two chance encounters, first with Jimmy Wallace in the theater, and

later with James Randolph, made her restlessness more nearly

unendurable. The thought that they were going back to Chicago and would,

no doubt, within a few days after their talks with her, see and talk

with him, was like the cup of Tantalus. And if she could encounter them

by chance, like that, why mightn't she encounter him? Why mightn't he

come to New York on business? She never walked anywhere, nowadays,

without watching for him.

She didn't yield, passively, to these thoughts and feelings. She fought

them relentlessly, methodically. She went to a women's gymnasium every

evening, threw a medicine ball around for a while, and then played a

hard game of squash, in the sometimes successful attempt to get tired

enough so that she'd have to sleep. Also she tried riding in the park,

mornings, but that didn't work so well, and she gave it up.

There came a Saturday morning, toward the end of May, which brought no

letter from Rodney, and she stayed in all day, from one delivery to the

next, waiting for it. She tried to disguise her excitement over its

failure to arrive, as a fear lest something might have gone wrong with

him or with the twins, but did not succeed. If anything had gone wrong

she knew she'd have heard. The thing that kept clutching at her heart

was hope. The hope that the letter wouldn't come at all; that there'd be

a telephone call instead--and Rodney's voice.

The telephone did ring just before noon, but the voice was Galbraith's.

He wanted to know if she wouldn't come over to his Long Island farm the

following morning and spend the day.

She had visited the place two or three times and had always enjoyed it

immensely there. It wasn't much of a farm, but there was a delightful

old Revolutionary farmhouse on it, with ceilings seven feet high and

casement windows, and the floors of all the rooms on different levels;

and Galbraith, there, was always quite at his best. His sister and her

husband, whom he had brought over from England when he bought the place,

ran it for him. They were the simplest sort of peasant people who had

hardly stirred from their little Surrey hamlet until that meteoric

brother of theirs had summoned them on their breath-taking voyage to

America, and for whom now, on this little Long Island farm, New York

might have been almost as far away as London. Mrs. Flaxman did all the

work of the house and farmyard without the aid of a servant, and her

husband raised vegetables for the New York market.

What the pair really thought of the life John Galbraith led, or of the

guests he sometimes brought out for week-end visits, no one knew. But

the pleasant sort of homely hospitality one always found there was

extremely attractive to Rose, and with Rodney's regular Saturday letter

at hand she'd have accepted the invitation eagerly. As it was, she

answered almost shortly that she couldn't come. Then, contrite, she

hastened to dilute her refusal with an elaboration of regrets and

hastily contrived reasons.

"All right," he said good-humoredly, "I shan't ask any one else, but if

you happen to change your mind call me on the phone in the morning. Tell

me what train you're coming down on and I'll meet you."

She didn't expect to change her mind, but a phonograph did it for her.

This instrument was domesticated across the court somewhere--she had

never bothered to discover just which pair of windows the sound of it

issued from--and it was addicted to fox-trots, comic recitations in

negro dialect, and the melodies of Mr. Irving Berlin. It was jolly and

companionable and Rose regarded it as a friend. But on this Saturday

night, perversely enough, perhaps because its master was in Pittsburgh

on a business trip and hadn't come home as expected, the thing turned

sentimental. It sang _I'm on My Way to Mandalay_, under the impression

that Mandalay was an island somewhere. It played _The Rosary_, done as a

solo on the cornet; and over and over again it sang, with the thickest,

sirupiest sentiment that John McCormack at his best is capable of,

"Just a little love, a li--ttle kiss,

Just an hour that holds a world of bliss,

Eyes that tremble like the stars above me,

And the little word that says you love me."

It was a song that had tormented Rose before with the abysmal fatuity of

its phrases, its silly sloppy melody, and yet--this was the infuriating

thing--the way it had of getting into her, somehow, reaching bare nerves

and setting them all aquiver.

To-night it broke her down. She closed the windows, despite the

sultriness of the night, but the tune, having once got in, couldn't be

shut out. Whether she heard it or only fancied she did, didn't matter.

The words bored their way into her brain.

"Just a little love, a little kiss,

I would give you all my life for this,

As I hold you fast and bend above you ..."

It was a white night for Rose. The morning sun had been streaming into

her bedroom for an hour before she finally fell asleep. And at nine

o'clock, when she wakened, she heard the phonograph going again. It was

now on its way to Mandalay, but John McCormack was no doubt waiting in

the background. She went to the telephone and called up Galbraith,

telling him she'd come by the first train she could get.

He met her with a dog-cart and a fat pony, and when they had jogged

their way to their destination they spent what was left of the morning

looking over the farm. Then there was a midday farm dinner that Rose

astonished herself by dealing with as it deserved and by feeling sleepy

at the conclusion of. Galbraith caught her biting down a yawn and packed

her off to the big Gloucester swing in the veranda, the one addition

he'd built on the place, for a nap; and obediently she did as he bade

her.

Coming into the veranda about four o'clock, and finding her awake, he

suggested that they go for a walk. She had dressed, in anticipation of

this, in a short skirt and heavy walking boots, so they set out across

the fields. Two hours later, having swung her legs over a stone wall

that had a comfortably inviting flat top, she remained sitting there and

let her gaze rest, unfocused, on the pleasant farm land that lay below

them.

After a glance at her he leaned back against the wall at her side and

began filling his pipe. She dropped her hand on his nearer shoulder.

After all these months of friendship it was the first approach to a

caress that had passed between them.

"You're a good friend," she said, and then the hand that had rested on

him so lightly suddenly gripped hard. "And I guess I need one," she

ended.

He went on filling his pipe. "Anything special you need one for?" he

asked quietly.

[Illustration: "You're a good friend," she said.]

She gave a ragged little laugh. "I guess not. Just somebody strong and

steady to hold on to like this."

"Well," he said very deliberately, "you want to realize this: You say

I'm a friend and I am, but if there is anything in this friendship which

can be of use to you you're entitled to it; to everything there is in

it. Because you made it."

"One person can't make a friendship," she said. "Even two people can't.

It's got to--grow out of them somehow."

He assented with a nod. "But in this case who gave it a chance to grow?

Where would it have been if I'd had my way? If you hadn't pulled me up

and set me straight?"

"For that matter," she said, "where would it have been if I had had

mine? If I'd run away and tried for a fresh start, as I'd have done if

you hadn't set me right?"

"Make it so," he said. "Say we've equal rights in it. Still you needn't

worry about my not getting my share of the benefits."

"You _are_ content with it, aren't you? Like this? I haven't--cheated?

Used you? It's easy for a woman to do that, I think. It isn't ...?" She

asked that last question by taking her hand off his shoulder.

"No, put it back," he said. "It's all right." He smoked in silence for a

minute; then went on. "Why, 'content' is hardly the word for it. When I

think what it was I wanted and what you've given me instead ...! It

wasn't self-denial or any other high moral principle that kept me from

flaring up when you took hold of me just now. It's because I've got a

better thing. Something I wouldn't trade for all the love in the world.

'Content'!"

"I'd like to believe it was a better thing," she said; "but I'm afraid I

can't."

"Neither could I when I was--how old are you?--twenty-four. Perhaps when

you're fifty-one you can."

"I suppose so," she said absently. "Perhaps if it were a question of

choosing between a love that hadn't any friendship in it and a

friendship ... But it _can't_ be like that!--Can it? Can't one have

both? Can't a man--love a woman and be her friend and partner all at the

same time?"

"I can't answer for every man," he said reflectively. "There are all

kinds of men. And that's not mentioning the queers, who aren't real men

at all. Take a dozen sound, normal, healthy men and if you could find

out the truth about them, which it would be pretty hard to do, you'd

find immense differences in their wants, habits, feelings; in the way

things _took_ them. But I've a notion that nine out of the dozen, if you

could get down to the actual bedrock facts about them, would own up that

if they were in love with a woman--really, you know, all the way--they

wouldn't want her for a partner, and wouldn't be able to see her as a

friend. That's just a guess, of course. But there's one thing I know,

and that is that I couldn't."

She gave a little shiver. "_Oh_, what a mess it is!" she said. "What a

perfectly hopeless blunder it is!" She slid down from the wall. "Come;

let's walk."

He fell in beside her and they tramped sturdily along for a while in

silence. At last she said, "Can you tell me why? Suppose there hadn't

been any one else with me; suppose I'd felt toward you the way you did

toward me, then; why couldn't you have gone on being my friend and

partner as well as my lover? You'd have known I was worth it; have known

I understood the things you were interested in and--yes, and was able to

help you to work them out. Why would all that have had to go?"

"Oh, I don't know that I can explain it," he said. "But I don't think

I'd call it a blunder that a strip of spring steel can't bend in your

fingers like copper and still go on being a spring. You see, a man

wants his work and then he wants something that isn't his work; that's

altogether apart from his work; doesn't remind him of it. Love's about

as far away as anything he can get. So that the notion of our working

ourselves half to death over the same job, and then going home

together ..."

"Yes," she admitted. "I can see that. But that doesn't cover

friendship."

He owned that it didn't. "But when I'm in love with a woman--this isn't

a fact I'm proud of, but it's true--I'm jealous of her. Not of other

men alone, though I'm that, too, but jealous of everything. I want to be

all around her. I want to be everything to her. I want her to think

there's nobody like me; that nobody else could be right and I be wrong.

And I want to be able to think the same of her. I want her to hide, from

me, the things about herself that I wouldn't like. When I ask her what

she thinks about something, I want her to say--what I want her to think.

I know what I want her to think, and if she doesn't say it she hurts my

feelings."

He thought it over a bit longer and then went on. "No, I've been in love

with women I could suspect of anything. Women I thought were lying to

me, cheating me; women I've hated; women I've known hated me. But I've

never been in love with a woman who was my friend. I'd never figured it

out before, but it's so."

In the process of figuring it out he'd more or less forgotten Rose. He

had been tramping along communing with his pipe; thinking aloud. If he'd

been watching her face he wouldn't have gone so far.

"Well, if it's like that," she said, and the quality of her voice drew

his full attention instantly--"if love has to be like that, then the

game doesn't seem worth going on with. You can't live with it, and you

can't live--without it." Her voice dropped a little, but gained in

intensity. "At least I can't. I don't believe I can." She stopped and

faced him. "What can one _do_?" she demanded. "Wait, I suppose you'll

say, till you're fifty. Well, you're fifty, and the thing can still

torment you; spring on you when you aren't looking; twist you about."

She turned away with a despairing gesture and stood gazing out,

tear-blinded, over the little valley the hilltop they had reached

commanded.

"You want to remember this," he said at last. "I've been talking about

myself. I haven't even pretended to guess for more than nine of those

twelve men. That leaves three who are, I am pretty sure, different. I

might have been different myself, a little anyway, if I'd got a

different sort of start. If my first love-affair had been an altogether

different thing. If it had been the kind that gave me a home and kids.

So you don't want to take what I've said for anything more than just the

truth about me. And I'm not, thank God, a fair sample."

He stood behind her, miserably helpless to say or do anything to comfort

her. An instinct told him she didn't want his hands on her just then,

and he couldn't unsay the things he had told her any further than he had

already.

Presently she turned back to him, slid her hand inside his arm, and

started down the road with him. "My love-affair brought me a home

and--kids," she said. "There are two of them--twins--a year and a half

old now; and I went off and left them; left him. And all I did it for

was to make myself over, into somebody he could be friends with, instead

of just--as I said then--his mistress. I'd never known a woman then who

was a man's mistress, really, and I didn't see why he should be so angry

over my using the word. I thought it was fair enough. And the day I left

his house I came to you and got a job in the chorus in _The Girl

Up-stairs_. I thought that by earning my own way, building a life that

he didn't--surround, as you say--I could win his friendship. And have

his love besides. I don't suppose you would have believed there could be

such a fool in the world as I was to do that."

He took a while digesting this truly amazing statement of hers, a

half-mile perhaps of steady silent tramping. But at last he said, "No, I

wouldn't call you a fool. I call a fool a person who thinks he can get

something for nothing. You didn't think that. You were willing to pay--a

heavy price it must have been, too--for what you wanted. And I've an

idea, you know, that you never really pay without getting something;

though you don't always get what you expect. You've got something now. A

knowledge of what you can do; of what you are worth; and I don't believe

you'd trade it for what you had the day before you came to me for a

job."

"I don't know," she said raggedly. "Perhaps ..." A sob clutched at her

throat and she did not try to conclude the sentence.

"As to whether you did right or wrong in leaving him," he went on,

"you've got to figure it this way. It isn't fair to say, 'Knowing what I

know now and being what I am now, but in the situation I was in then,

I'd have done differently.' The thing you've got to take into account

is, being what you were then, suppose you hadn't gone? You thought then

that you were just his mistress, not knowing what a real mistress was

like; and you thought that by going away you could make yourself his

friend. You thought that was your great chance. Well, you couldn't have

stayed without feeling that you had thrown away your chance; without

knowing that you'd had your big thing to do and had been afraid to do

it. And that knowledge would have gone a long way toward making you the

thing you thought you were.

"Well, you did your big thing. And a person who's done that has stayed

alive anyway; and he knows that when his next big thing comes along

he'll do that too. I don't pretend that you'll always come out right in

the end if you do the big thing, but I'm pretty sure of this; that you

never come out at all if you refuse it."

His amazement over what she had done increased as he thought about it

and was testified to every now and then by grunts and snorts and little

exclamations, but he made no more articulate comment.

There was a seven-thirty train she thought she ought to take back to

town and as their walk had led in that direction they finished it at the

station, where he waited with her for the train to come in.

"It's been a good day," she said. "I feel as if you'd somehow pulled me

through."

"And I," he said, "feel like a wind-bag. I've talked and talked; smug

comfortable preaching."

"No, it's helped," she insisted. "Or something has. Just having you

there, perhaps. I feel better, anyway."

But after she'd got her last look at him on the platform, when the train

had carried her off, an observer, seeing the way the color faded out of

her face, and the look in the eyes, which, so wide open and so unseeing,

stared straight ahead, would have said that the benefit hadn't lasted

long. There was about her the look of somber terror, just verging on

panic, which you have seen in a child's face when he has been sent

up-stairs to bed alone in the dark.