“You can’t tell much,” she used to say, “by the things people say to you.  Perhaps they’ve just heard somebody else say them.  Maybe they’ve got a repertory that it will take you weeks to get to the end of.  Or they may not be able to show you at all what’s really inside them.  But from how they take the things you say to them—­the things they light up at and the things they look blank about, the things they’re too anxious to show you they understand, and the things they dare admit they never heard of—­you can tell every time.  Find out all you want to know about anybody in an hour!”

Rose, it seemed, reacted satisfactorily to her tests, since she was introduced as rapidly thereafter as their scanty leisure made possible, to Gertrude’s more immediate circle of friends.

During that first winter, she enjoyed them immensely.  They were all interesting; all “did things”; widely various things, yet, somehow, related.  There was a red-haired fire-brand whose specialty seemed to be bailing out girls arrested for picketing and whose Sunday diversion consisted in going down to Paterson, New Jersey, making the police ridiculous and unhappy for an hour or so, delivering herself of a speech in defiance of their preventive efforts and finally escaping arrest by a hair’s breadth.  They got her finally but since she enjoyed the privilege of addressing as Uncle a man whose name was uttered with awe about the corner of Broad Street and Exchange Place, they had to let her go.

There was a young woman lawyer, associated with Gertrude in an organization for getting jobs for girls who had just been let out of jail, a level-headed enterprise, which by conserving its efforts for those who really wished to benefit by them, managed to accomplish a good deal.  One of their circle was associate editor of a popular magazine and another wrote short stories, mostly about shop-girls.  The last one of them for Rose to meet, she having been out of town all summer, was Alice Perosini.  She was the daughter of a rich Italian Jew, a beautiful—­really a wonderful person to look at—­but a little unaccountable, especially with the gorgeous clothes she wore, in their circle.  Rose took her time about deciding that she liked her but ended by preferring her to all the rest.  She never talked much; would smoke and listen, making most of her comments in pantomime, but she had a trick of capping a voluble discussion with a hard-chiseled phrase which, whether you felt it precisely fitted or not, you found it difficult to escape from.

What forced Rose to a realization of her preference for Alice was the impulse to tell her who she really was and the suddenly following reflection that she never had wanted to tell any of the others; that she had taken care to avoid all reference to the husband and the babies she had fled from in search of a life of her own.