The tie of blood is a powerful thing.  Rose had never realized before how powerful.  With Harriet’s arrival, she became aware of the Aldrich family as a sodality—­something she didn’t belong to and never could.  It was quite true, as Frederica had said, that she and Rodney had always been special pals.  Harriet fitted into the family on the other side of Frederica from her brother.  She was a person with a good deal of what one calls magnetism, and she attracted Frederica toward herself—­made her, when she was about, a somewhat different Frederica.  She even attracted Rodney a little in the same way.

The time of the year (it was after the end of the social season) made it natural for them to be together a good deal.  And of course Harriet’s return, after an absence of years, made them seek such meetings.  The result was that Rose, at the end of almost a year of marriage, got her first real taste of lonesomeness.  When the four of them were together, Rose felt like an outsider intruding on intimates.  They didn’t mean her to feel that way—­made a distinct effort, Rodney and Frederica, anyway, to prevent her feeling that way; which of course only pointed it.  They had old memories to talk about; old friendships.  They had, like all close knit families, a sort of shorthand language to talk in.  If Rose came into the room where they were, she’d often be made aware that the current subject of the conversation had been dropped and a new one was getting started; or else there’d be laborious explanations.

It wouldn’t have mattered—­not so much anyway, if Rose had had a similar sodality of her own to fall back on—­a mass of roots extending out into indigenous soil.  But Rose, you see, had been transplanted.  Her two brothers were hardly more than faint memories of her childhood.  One was a high-school principal down in Pennsylvania; the other a professor of history at one of the western state universities.  Both of them had married young and had been very much married—­on small incomes—­ever since.  The only family she had that counted, was her mother and Portia.  And they were gone now to California.

She had had a world of what she called friends, of course, of her own age, at the high school and at the university.  But her popularity in those circles, her easy way of liking everybody, and her energetic preoccupation with things to do, had prevented any of these friendships from biting in very deep.  None of them had been solidly founded enough to withstand the wavelike rush of Rodney Aldrich into her life.  She had gone over altogether into her husband’s world.  The world that had been her own, hadn’t much more existence, except for her mother and sister out in California, than the memory of a dream.

But it took Harriet’s arrival to make her realize this.  And the realization, when it was pressed home particularly hard, brought with it moments of downright panic.  Everything—­everything she had in the world, went back to Rodney.  Except for him, she was living in an absolute vacuum.  What would happen if the stoutly twisted cable that bound her to him should be broken, as the cable that bound Harriet to her husband was, apparently, broken?  What would she have then of which she could say, “This much is mine”?  Well, she’d have the child.  That would be, partly at least, hers.