She’d discovered, along in the winter sometime, that Harriet’s affairs were going rather badly.  Neither Rodney nor Frederica had gone into details.  But it was plain enough that both of them were looking for a smash of some sort.  It was in May that the cable came to Frederica announcing that Harriet was coming back for a long visit.  “That’s all she said,” Rodney explained to Rose.  “But I suppose it means the finish.  She said she didn’t want any fuss made, but she hinted she’d like to have Freddy meet her in New York, and Freddy’s going.  Poor old Harriet!  That’s rather a pill for her to swallow, if it’s so.  We must try to cheer her up.”

She didn’t seem much in need of cheering up, Rose thought, when they first met.  All that showed on the contessa’s highly polished surface was a disposition to talk humorously over old times with her old friends, including her brother and sister, and a sort of dismayed acquiescence in the smoky seriousness, the inadequate civilization, the sprawling formlessness of the city of her birth, not excluding that part of it which called itself society.

In broad strokes, you could describe Harriet by saying she was as different as a beautiful woman could be from Frederica.  She wasn’t so beautiful as Frederica, to be sure, but together they made a wonderfully contrasted pair—­Harriet almost as perfect a brunette type as Frederica was a blonde, and got up with her ear-rings and her hair and all to look rather exotic.  Her speech, too, and the cultivated things she could do with her shoulders, carried out the impression.  She had a trick—­when she wanted to be disagreeable an ill-natured observer would have said—­of making remarks in Italian and then translating them.

She wasn’t disagreeable though—­not malicious anyway, and the very hard finish she carried, had been developed probably as a matter of protection.  She must have been through a good deal in the last few years.  She’d had two children stillborn, for one thing, and she was frankly afraid to try it again.  She never wanted any sympathy from anybody.  If it came down to that, she’d prefer arsenic.  She resisted Rose’s rather poignant charm, as she resisted any other appeal to her emotions.  With the charm left out, Rose was simply a well meaning, somewhat insufficiently civilized young person, the beneficiary, through her marriage with Rodney, of a piece of unmerited good fortune.  She didn’t in the least mean to be unkind to her, however, and didn’t dream that she was giving Rose an inkling how she thought of her.

Her manner toward this new member of the family was studiously affectionate.  She avoided being either disagreeable or patronizing.  Rose could see, indeed, how carefully she avoided it.  She knew, too, that Frederica saw the same thing and tried to compensate for it by a little extra affectionateness.  She even thought—­though perhaps this was mere self-consciousness—­that she detected a trace of the same thing in Rodney.