And yet, queerly enough, in terms of literal lineal measurement, the distance between the windows themselves, was less than a thousand yards.  Less than ten minutes’ walking from the mouth of the little tunnel alongside the delicatessen shop, would take her back to her husband’s door.  She had, in her flight out into the new world, doubled back on her trail.  And, such is the enormous social and spiritual distance between North Clark Street and The Drive, she was as safely hidden here, as completely out of the orbit of any of her friends, or even of her friends’ servants, as she could have been in New York or in San Francisco.

Having to come away furtively like this was a terrible countermine beneath her courage.  If only she could have had a flourish of defiant trumpets to speed her on her way!  But, done like that, the thing would have hurt Rodney too intolerably.  His intelligence might be twentieth century or beyond.  It might acquiesce in, or even enthusiastically advocate, a relation between men and women that hadn’t existed, anyway since the beginning of the Christian Era; it might accept without faltering, all the corollaries pendent to that relation.  But his actuating instincts, his psychical reflexes, stretched their roots away back to the Middle Ages.  Under the dominance of those instincts, a man lost caste—­became an object of contemptuous derision, if he couldn’t keep his wife.  It was bad enough to have another man take her away from him, but it was worse to have her go away in the absence of such an excuse; worst of all, to have her go away to seek a job and earn her own living.

Rose didn’t know how long the secret could be kept.  Wherever she went, whatever she did, there’d always be the risk that some one who could carry back the news to Rodney’s friends, would recognize her.  It was a risk that had to be taken, and she didn’t intend to allow herself to be paralyzed by a perpetual dread of what might at any time happen.  At the same time, she’d protect the secret as well as she could.

But there were two people it couldn’t be kept from—­Portia and her mother.  Rose had at first entertained the notion of keeping her mother in the dark.  It wasn’t until she had spent a good many hours figuring out expedients for keeping the deception going, that she realized it couldn’t be done.  She had been writing her mother a letter a week ever since the departure to California—­letters naturally full of domestic details that simply couldn’t be kept up.  The only possible deception would be a compromise with the truth and compromises of that sort are apt to be pretty unsatisfactory.  They suggest concealments in every phase, and to an imaginative mind, are more terrifying, nine times in ten, than the truth you’re trying to soften.  Then, too, the story given out to Rodney’s friends being that Rose was in California with her mother and Portia, left the chance always open for some contretemps which would lead to her mother’s discovering the truth in a surprising and shocking way.