John Galbraith’s letter asking Rose to report to him July first in New York, reached her via Portia, during the last week in June, and made an abrupt conclusion to her life at Centropolis.

Those weeks with Miss Gibbons in the millinery parlor, when she looked back on them afterward, set in as they were between that purgatorial winter and the first breathless months while she was establishing herself in New York, had a quality of happiness and peace, which she was wont to describe as heavenly.

She’d probably have taken to Miss Gibbons in any circumstance.  But, coming into her life just when she did, the little woman was the shadow of a great rock to her.  She was in a state, when she settled down in the milliner’s spare back room over the drug-store, where all the warmer emotions seemed terrible to her.  It was Rodney’s love for her and hers for him, that had bruised and lacerated her; that had made the winter months a long torment, unmitigated during the last of them, by any form of adequate self-expression.  The two parodies on love which had been thrust into her face just at the end, Olga Larson’s inverted form of it toward herself, and Dolly’s shabby little romance, had given her an absolute loathing for it.  To her, in that condition, any expression of friendship that was warm and soft, and in the least sentimental, would have been almost unendurable to her.  Miss Gibbons, in that acrid antiseptic way of hers, simply washed her soul in cold water and clothed it again in the garments of self-respect.

Her manner to Rose, even as their friendship ripened and grew more confident, never changed.  Nor did the manner Rose adopted toward her.  Their endless talks resulted in a good deal of self-revelation, but this was never direct.  Miss Gibbons never again came as near to a confidential account of her life, as she did on that first afternoon, when she explained the thoroughness of her acquaintance with Judge Granger.  And Rose never explained how it had happened that she was left at the mercy of the town of Centropolis by the failure of The Girl Up-stairs company.  But she poured out for her friend a wealth of illustrative reminiscences, drawn from her childhood, her days at the university, her life on the stage; and though she was a good deal more reticent about it, she even touched on her married life with Rodney; at least, on the collateral incidents of it.

Miss Gibbons listened to all this with a hunger she didn’t conceal, and this eagerness gave Rose a pretty vivid picture of the inner life the little woman had lived here in Centropolis.

If she’d been born a boy instead of a girl, she’d probably have equaled, or outstripped, Rose thought, her father’s eminence.  With her courage, her vitality, her fine penetrating intelligence, she’d have managed to win her way out of this stagnant little back-water of life.  But, having been born a girl, brought up helpless, as became the daughter of the circuit judge, and then having had this support wrenched from under her at the critical moment, there had been nothing for her but—­hats.