“It’s all very well,” she exploded, “to say that Rose can’t come back.  But as a matter of fact she’s never been out of it.  At least the hole she left has never closed up.  You all agree that she’s to be forgotten and treated as a regrettable incident, but you keep on talking about her.  It’s like Roosevelt.  There she is all the time.”

She didn’t dare catch John’s eye for the next twenty minutes, but she knew precisely, without looking, the exasperated quality of his stare.

It was true.  They couldn’t let her alone.  Speculation flared up again, and this time with a justifiable basis, when it became known that Rodney had bought the McCrea house; bought it outright, for cash, with its complete contents.

Of course everybody knew that Rodney was getting rich.  And he was doing it, as Frank Crawford pointed out to Constance, with precisely the same contemptuous disregard of money that he had shown before his marriage.

“He doesn’t care what he charges, and he didn’t care then.  Only then it was out of the little end of the horn, and now it’s out of the big.  And the thing that seems to make him particularly wild is that the higher the price he puts on his opinions, the more people there are who think that nobody’s opinion but his is any good.  So he just grins at them and goes up another notch.  He’s no better a lawyer, he says, than he was when his practise brought him in ten thousand a year.  Of course he is a better lawyer.  He’s getting better all the time.  He does deliver the goods.  And fighting out these great big cases really educates a man.  You can’t be really first-class unless you’ve got first-class things to do.  And down inside Rodney knows that as well as anybody.

“Only, with all his money, after the way he’s talked about that house—­the way he’s damned it and made fun of it, what did he want to go and buy it for?”

Constance had an idea he’d got it at a bargain.  The McCreas had made a flying trip home just to sell it.  Their investments had gone off, it seemed, still further, and besides, Florence had at last found something in the world to be in earnest about, and that was in France; the American hospital.  Florence had already taken an emergency training course in nursing.  Her husband, whose one marked talent was that of a chauffeur, was going to drive a motor ambulance, and they were both on fire to get back to Paris into the thick of things.  Almost any round sum, in absolutely spot cash, would satisfy them.  So Rodney, too busy with other things to take the trouble to invest his money, would have been in a position to get the house cheap.  It was Constance’s opinion that he had.

“Do you know anybody in the world,” her husband demanded, “less likely to be interested in a bargain than Rodney?  Or to pick a thing up because it is cheap?”

“Well, then,” Constance said, “you must think he’s expecting Rose, sometime or other, to come back to him.  Because if he meant to get a divorce and marry some one else, he certainly wouldn’t want to live in that house with her.  He’d want as few reminders as possible, not as many.  And yet, it was Rose herself, according to Harriet, who was so anxious, toward the last, to get rid of the place.  So there you are!  It’s a mystery any way you take it.”