Frederica was amused, but didn’t think there was much to that.  Of course, if the play was very thrilling, and you liked the leading man, you might build yourself into the romance somehow.  But when it came to the real thing ...

“No, there is something in it,” Eleanor insisted.  “There’s something you can’t get in any other way.  Whom do you think I’d pick,” she asked suddenly, “for the happiest wife I know?  Edith Welles.  Yes, really.  Oh, I know, her husband’s a slacker and no real good to anybody.  And he goes out every now and then and drinks too much and doesn’t know just what happens afterward.  But he always comes back and wants to be forgiven.  And he thinks she’s an angel,—­which she is—­and he thinks he isn’t worthy to put on her rubbers—­which he isn’t, and—­well, there you are!  She knows she’s got him, somehow.

“But you take Jim.  I can get my way with him always.  I can outmaneuver him every time.  He’s positively simple about things, unless they happen to strike him—­professionally.  But there’s always something that gets away.  Something I’m no nearer now than I was the day I first saw him.  And I sometimes think that if there were—­something horrible I had to forgive him for—­if I could get something on him as they say....  It’s rather fun, isn’t it, sometimes, just to let your mind go wild and see where you bring up.  Awful rot, of course.  Can you stop for lunch?”

Frederica thought she couldn’t; must run straight along.  But the talk had been amusing.  “Only—­you won’t mind?—­don’t spring any of that stuff on Rose.  She’s just a child, really you know, and entitled to any illusions that Rodney leaves; especially these days.”

“You, as an old hen fussing about your new chicken!” Eleanor mocked.  “Wait till you can look the part a little better, Frederica, dear.  But really, I’m harmless.  Talk to Jim and Rodney and those fearful and wonderful Lakes of his.  They were there, and—­well, you ought to have heard the talk.  I thought I was pretty well hardened, but once or twice I gasped.  Jim’s pretty weird when he gets going, but that Barry Lake has a sort of—­surgical way of discussing just anything, and his wife’s as bad.  Oh, she’s awfully interesting, I’ll admit that, and she’s as crazy about Rose as any of the rest of us, which is to her credit.

“We never got off women all the evening.  Barry Lake had their history down from the early Egyptians, and Jim had an endless string of pathological freaks to tell about.  And then Rodney came out strong for economic independence, only with his own queer angle on it of course.  He thought it would be a fine thing, but it wouldn’t happen until the men insisted on it.  When a girl wasn’t regarded as marriageable unless she had been trained to a trade or a profession, then things would begin to happen.  I think he meant it, too, though he was more than usually outrageous in his way of putting things.