John Williamson said he understood, though when Violet pressed him for an explanation he was a little vague.

“Why,” he said, “it’s just a polite way of telling us all to go to the devil.  He knows we’re all talking our heads off about him, and sympathizing with him, and wondering what he’s going to do, and he buys that house to serve notice that he’s going to stay put.  Business as usual at the old stand.  I shouldn’t be surprised if he meant the same message for Rose.  That is to say, that the place will always be there for her to come back to.”

Outside their immediate circle, no such imaginative explanations were resorted to.  Rose was coming back of course.  And the interesting theme for speculation was what would happen to her when she did.  Would she try to take her old place; ignore the past; treat that outrageous escapade with the Globe chorus as if it had never happened?  And if she did try to do that, could she succeed?  It all depended on what a few people did.  If they, the three or four supremely right ones, were to acquiesce in this treatment of the situation, Rose could, more or less, get away with it.  Although even then, things could never be quite the same.

But the sterility of these speculations gradually became apparent as the winter months slipped away and Rose did not come back.  It was felt, though such a feeling would have looked absurd if put into words, that by failing to come when the stage was set for her, as by Rodney’s act in purchasing the McCrea house it was, missing her cue like that, letting them, with such a lot of solemn thought, discuss and prepare their attitudes toward her, all in vain, she had, somehow, aggravated her original offense in running away.

And, just as suddenly as they had begun talking about her, they stopped.  Rodney and the twins, living alone in the perfect house, under the ministrations of a housekeeper, a head nurse and an undiminished corps of servants, came to be accepted as a fact that could be mentioned without any string of commiserations tied to it.  Their world wagged on as usual.  If, as John Williamson said, the hole where Rose had been torn out of it had never been closed up, people managed to walk around the edge of it with an apparently complete unawareness that it was there.  There were fresher themes for gossip: 

Hermione Woodruff’s amazing marriage, for example, to a dapper little futurist painter named Bunting, ten years, the uncharitable said, younger than she was.  And then the Randolphs!  After all the thrilling events of their romance, were they drifting on the reefs?  There were straws that indicated the wind was blowing that way.

This was the state of things when Jimmy Wallace threw his bomb.

There was always a warm, corner in Jimmy Wallace’s bachelor heart for youth, and innocence, and enthusiasm.  Especially for young girls who were innocent and enthusiastic.  But since he suspected himself of a tendency to idealize these qualities, even to sentimentalize upon them, he generally kept a cautious distance off.  Rose, with the bloom that was on her, and the glow that radiated from her the night he was introduced to her at a dinner party at the Williamsons’, had struck him—­he was unconscious of this mental process no doubt—­as a person whom it would be difficult, at close range, to remain quite level-headed about.