Consequently, though his and Rodney’s common friendship for the Lakes had drawn him rather intimately into their circle, his attitude toward Rose herself throughout had remained deliberately detached and impersonal.  He was not in the least priggish about it.  He was quite willing to let it appear that he liked her and to admit that she liked him.  But their talk had always been not only objective, but about objects comparatively remote; chorus-girls, for example, and Norse sagas, to take at random two of his wide assortment of hobbies.

He never felt himself in any danger of idealizing Violet Williamson or Bella Forrester, and they, along with their respective husbands, were the nearest approach to intimates he had in that segment of society which gets itself spelled with a capital S.

Violet’s attitude toward Rose, as revealed to him at the little dinner following the Williamsons’ discovery of Rose in the Globe chorus, had not in the least surprised him.  For, with her husband he had recognized in her biting contempt of the thing the girl had done, the typical attitude of her class.  He didn’t do Society very much, but he dipped expertly now and then.  He understood the class—­loyalty that is woven into all their traditions, and knew how violently it was outraged by Rose’s inexplicable bolt.

But, as I said, he went home after that dinner, rather mournful over Violet’s failure to see an aspect of the thing which, it seemed to him, should have been apparent to anybody:  this was Rose’s courage in actually doing the thing.  The idea that had evidently prompted the act was a perfectly familiar guest at their tea-tables.  Rose wouldn’t have had to go to “that votes-for-women mother of hers” to pick up the notion of the desirability of economic independence for women.  But, instead of playing with the idea, Rose had gripped it in both hands and gone through with it; and at what cost of resolution and courage Jimmy was perhaps the only one of her friends capable of forming an adequate conception.  But he’d have thought that even Violet might be expected to see that a mere petulant restlessness wouldn’t have carried her through; might have admitted, if only in parenthesis, the gameness the girl had shown.

She’d made no attempt to get the cards stacked in her favor, as she might so easily have done.  She must have thought of coming to him for advice and help; must have known how gladly he’d give it.  A note from him to Goldsmith would have spared her untold terrors and uncertainties.  Yet she had denied herself that help; gone ahead and done the thing on her own.

He could imagine the sort of test Galbraith had put her to before giving her a job at all.  He’d seen inexperienced girls applying for positions in the chorus.  He knew the sort of work that lay behind her advancement to the sextette.  He knew that her presence there on the stage of the Globe the opening night, unrecognized by any one in the company as anybody except Doris Dane of nowhere, represented a solid achievement that a girl with Rose’s background and training might be proud of.