So you will understand, I think, that the Rose, who incredulously heard him ask in that dull sullen tone, if she had anything besides what would go into her trunk; the Rose who got up and turned on the light for a look at him in the hope that the evidence of her eyes would belie that of her ears; the Rose he left shuddering at the window in that quilted dressing-gown, was not the Rose who had left him three months before and rented that three-dollar room and wrung a job out of Galbraith!

Dimly she was aware of this herself.  At her best she wouldn’t have lost her head, wouldn’t have flown to pieces like that.  If she’d kept any sort of grip on the situation, she might at least have averted a total shipwreck.  She understood even on that gray morning, that the terrible things he’d said to her had been a mere outcry; the expression of a mood she had encountered before, though this was an extreme example of it.

But it was a long time before she went any further than that.  The memory of the whole episode from the moment when he came up to her there in the alley and took her by the shoulders, until he closed her door upon himself four hours or so later, was so exquisitely painful that any reasoned analysis of it, any construction of potential alternatives to the thing that had happened, was simply impossible.  The misgiving that with a little more courage and patience on her part, it might have terminated differently, only added to her misery.

She felt like a coward when she went to Goldsmith and demanded to be sent out on the road, and she experienced for a while, the utter demoralization of cowardice.  The logic of the situation told her to stay where she was.  If it were true, as she had fiercely told him that night, that their life together was ended, the whole fabric that they had woven for themselves rent clean across, then the only thing for her to do was to begin living now, as she had made an effort to do before, quite without reference to him, ordering her own existence as if he had ceased to exist; stick to whatever offered herself, Doris Dane, the best chance for success and advancement.  She was, of course, seriously injuring Doris Dane’s chances by going out on the road.

And, even with reference to Rodney, it was hard to see how her flight could help the situation.  If what she’d done had really disgraced him in his own eyes and in those of his world, the disgrace was already complete.  Acquiescing in that point of view, as by her flight she did, couldn’t lighten it.

But all the power these considerations had, was to make her flight seem more ignominious.  They were utterly incapable of preventing it.

A disinterested friend, had she boasted such a possession just then, might have pointed out for her comfort, that her rout was not complete.  It was a retreat, but not a surrender.  She hadn’t become Rose Stanton again and gone back to Portia and her mother.  Doris Dane, though badly battered, was still intact!