“Who are ’we’?” She accompanied that question with a straight look into his eyes; the first since they had sat down across this table.

“Why,” he said, “the only two people I’ve talked with about it—­Frederica and Harriet.  I thought you’d be glad to know that they felt as I did.”

The first flash of genuine feeling she had shown, was the one that broke through on her repetition of the name “Harriet!”

“Yes,” he said, and he had, for about ten seconds, the misguided sense of dialectical triumph.  “I know a little how you feel toward her, and maybe she’s justified it.  But not in this case.  Because it was Harriet who made me see that there wasn’t anything—­disgraceful about your going on the stage.  It was her own idea that you ought to use your own name and give us a chance to help you.  She’ll be only too glad to help.  And she knows some people in New York who have influence in such matters.”

During the short while she let elapse before she spoke, his confidence in the conviction-carrying power of this statement ebbed somewhat, though he hadn’t seen yet what was wrong with it.

“Yes,” she said at last, “I think I can see Harriet’s view of it.  As long as Rose had run away and joined a fifth-rate musical comedy in order to be on the stage, and as long as everybody knew it, the only thing to do was to get her into something respectable so that you could all pretend you liked it.  It was all pretty shabby, of course, for the Aldriches, and in a way, what you deserved for marrying a person like that.  Still, that was no reason for not putting the best face on it you could.—­And that’s why you came to find me!”

“No, it isn’t,” he said furiously.  His elaborately assumed manner had broken down, anyway.  “I came because I couldn’t help coming.  I’ve been sick—­sick ever since that night over the way you were living, over the sort of life I’d—­driven you to.  I’ve felt I couldn’t stand it.  I wanted you to know that I’d assent to anything, any sort of terms that you wanted to make that didn’t involve—­this.  If it’s the stage, all right.—­Or if you’d come home—­to the babies.  I wouldn’t ask anything for myself.  You could be as independent of me as you are here....”

He’d have gone on elaborating this program rather further but the look of blank incredulity in her face stopped him.

“I say things wrong,” he concluded with a sudden humility that quenched the spark of anger in her eyes.  “I was a fool to quote Harriet, and I haven’t done much better in speaking for myself.  I can’t make you see.”

“Oh, I can see plainly enough, Roddy,” she said, with a tired little grimace that was a sorry reminder of her old smile.  “I guess I see too well.  I’m sorry to have hurt you and made you miserable.  I knew I was going to do that, of course, when I went away, but I hoped that after a while, you’d come to see my side of it.  You can’t at all.  You couldn’t believe that I was happy in that little room up on