It was an enormous relief to her, and, she fancied, to him, for that matter, when, after a premonitory knock at the door, Harriet walked in on them.

The situation didn’t need much explaining, but Frederica summed it up while the others exchanged their coolly friendly greetings, with the statement: 

“Rod’s been trying to get me to go to Rose and say that it was all his fault, and I won’t.”

“Why not?” said Harriet.  “What earthly thing does it matter whose fault it is?  He can have it his fault if he likes.”

“You know it isn’t,” Frederica muttered rebelliously.

Harriet seated herself delicately and deliberately in one of the curving ends of a little Victorian sofa, and stretched her slim legs out in front of her.

“Certainly I don’t care whose fault it is,” she said.  “You never get anywhere by trying to decide a question like that.  What I’m interested in is what can be done about it.  It’s not a very nice situation.  Nobody likes it—­at least I should think Rose would be pretty sick of it by now.  She may have been crazy for a stage career, but she’s probably seen that the chorus of a third-rate musical comedy won’t take her anywhere.

“The thing’s simply a mess, and the only thing to do, is to clear it up as quickly and as decently as we can—­and it can be cleared up, if we go at it right.  Only, for the love of Heaven, Freddy, before you let Rod go out of the house, give him a dose of veronal and pack him off to a quiet room up-stairs to sleep around the clock!  The way he looks now, he’s a proclamation of calamity across the street!”

She wasn’t at all disturbed by the outburst this provoked from Rodney.  Indeed, Frederica, from a glimpse she got of her face as she sat listening to his blistering denunciation of this apparently whole-hearted concern for appearances, and his passionate denial that they meant anything at all to him, suspected that her sister’s words had been calculated to produce just this result.  When it had subsided, Harriet’s first words proved it.

[Illustration:  “What earthly thing does it matter whose fault it is?”]

“All right,” she observed.  “I knew you’d want to say that.  Now, it’s off your mind.  Appearances do matter to Freddy and me, and of course they matter to you too, though you don’t like to think so.  They matter to all our kind of people.  We’re supposed to have been trained to take our medicine without making faces.  If we’ve got cuts and sores and bruises, we cover them.  We don’t parade them as a bid for sympathy.  We leave howling about rights and wrongs and soul-mates and affinities and ‘ideals,’ to the shabby sort of people who like to do that shabby sort of thing.  According to our traditions, the decent thing to do is to shut up and keep your face and make it possible for other people to keep theirs.  You’re as strong for that as I am, really, Rod, and that’s why I want you to back me up in the line I took with Constance.  Pretend you’ve known all about what Rose was doing, and that you aren’t ashamed of it.  It would have been easier, of course, if she’d played fair with us at the start ...”