“Little things,” she protested; “little tiny things that couldn’t possibly matter—­things that any woman would be on another woman’s—­side, as you say, about.”

But she contradicted this statement at once.  “Oh, I did love her!” she said fiercely.  “Not just because she loved you, but because I thought she was altogether adorable.  I couldn’t help it.  And of course that’s what makes me so perfectly furious now—­that she should have done a thing like this to you.”

“All right,” he said.  “Never mind about that.  This is what I want you to do.  I want you to go to see her, and I want you to ask her, in the first place, to try to forgive me.”

“What for?” Frederica demanded.

“I want you to tell her,” he went on, “that it’s impossible that she should be more horrified at the thing I did than I am myself.  I want you to ask her, whatever she thinks my deserts are, to do just one thing for me, and that is to let me take her out of that perfectly hideous place.  I don’t ask anything else but that.  She can make any terms she likes.  She can live where or how she likes.  Only—­not like that.  Maybe it’s a deserved punishment, but I can’t stand it!”

There was the crystallization of what little thinking he had managed to do in the two purgatorial days he’d spent in that down-state hotel—­in the intervals of fighting off the torturing jingle of that tune, and the memory of the dull frozen agony he’d seen in Rose’s face as he left her.  No great result, truly.  The mountain had labored and brought forth a mouse.

But reflect for a moment what Rodney’s life had been; how gently, for all his buoyant theories about the acceptance of discipline, the world, in its material aspect at any rate, had dealt with him.  How completely that boyish arrogance of his had been allowed to grow unbruised by circumstance.  He’d always been rich, in the sense that his means had always been sufficient to his wants.  He’d never in his life had an experience that even resembled Portia’s with that old unpaid grocery bill.  He’d enjoyed wearing shabby clothes, but he’d never worn them because he could afford no better.  He’d always been democratic in the narrower social sense, but he’d never realized how easy that sort of democracy is and how little it means to a man never associated with persons who assert a social superiority over him.  He’d always made a point of despising luxuries, to be sure.  But it hadn’t been brought to his attention at how high a level he drew the line between luxuries and mere decent necessities.

He wasn’t then, near so much of a Spartan as he thought.  His long association with the Lakes and their friends might, you’d think, have brought him the consolatory reflection that a woman who earned even a successful chorus-girl’s wages, needn’t be pitied too lamentably on the score of poverty; that Rose could, no doubt, have afforded a better room than that, if she’d wanted to.  And that even a three-dollar room, a whole room that you hadn’t to share with anybody, would—­if the rent of it left you money enough to send out your clothes to the laundry and to buy adequate meals in restaurants—­represent luxury—­well, to more people than one likes to think about.