Jimmy made a little gesture of regret.  He’d have spoken too, but she didn’t give him time.

“You don’t mean to tell me,” she cried, “that you didn’t find out where she lived while you were right there in New York!”

John came in just then with the cocktails and Violet, turning to him tragically, repeated, “He doesn’t even know where she lives!”

“Oh, I’m a boob, I know,” said Jimmy.  “Give me a cocktail.  A telephone’s the driest thing in the world to talk into.  But, as I told the other five ...”

Violet frowned as she echoed, “The other five—­what?”

Jimmy turned to John Williamson with a perfectly electric grin.

“The other five of Rose Aldrich’s friends—­and yours,” he said, “who called me up this afternoon and invited me to dinner, and asked for her address so that they could write her notes and tell her how glad they were.”

John said, “Whoosh!” all but upset his tray and slammed it down on the piano, in order to leave himself free to jubilate properly.  With solemn joy he ceremoniously shook hands with Jimmy.

Violet stood looking at them thoughtfully.  A little flush of color was coming up into her face.

“You two men,” she said, “are trying to act as if I weren’t in this; as if I weren’t just as glad as you are, and hadn’t as good a right to be.  John here,” this was to Jimmy, “has been gloating ever since he came home with the paper.  And you ...  Did you mean me by that snippy little thing you said about the ‘I-knew-her-when’ club?  Oh, it was fair enough.  I’m glad you said it.  Because some people we know have been downright catty about her.  But you both know perfectly well that I’ve stood up for her ever since last fall when we came through New York.”

John grinned.  “When you saw her,” he pointed out, “riding down Fifth Avenue in a taxi, in an expensive dress....”

“It wasn’t.  I didn’t see what she had on.  I just saw that she looked ...”

“Successful,” John interrupted.  But, meeting her eye, he apologized hastily and withdrew the word.  His gale of spirits had blown him a little too far.

“I saw,” said Violet with dignity, “that she looked busy and cheerful, as if she knew, in her own mind, that she was all right.  And I was glad for her, and for us.  Because you can say what you like, you can’t do anything with the people who have made mistakes and know it, and are always on the defensive about them.  When I saw she didn’t feel like that, that was enough for me.  And,” she fairly impaled John Williamson now with her eye, “and you know it.”

It was an able summary of her public attitude since the encounter on Fifth Avenue, and her look at her husband relegated any private observations of hers at variance with it into the limbo, not of things forgotten, but of things undone, unsaid, dissolved by the sheer force of their unfitness to exist, into the breath that begot them.