She never tried to explain to herself the feeling that imposed this reticence on her, until the discovery that it didn’t exist toward Alice.  She couldn’t have feared that they would not approve of what she had done; it squared so exactly with all their ideas.  Indeed the one real bond between them was a common revolt against the traditional notion that the way for a woman to effect her will in the world was by “influencing” a man.  They wanted to hold the world in their own hands.  They contemned the “feminine” arts of cajolery.  They wanted no odds from anybody.  There wasn’t a real man-hater in the crowd, they were too normal and healthy for that.  But they didn’t talk much about men; never, as far as Rose knew, about men—­as such.  Was the topic suppressed, she wondered, or was it just that they didn’t think about them?

That question made her realize how little she knew of any of them; how limited was the range of their intercourse.  It was as if they met in a sort of mental gymnasium, fenced with one another, did callisthenics.  Oh, that was going too far, of course; it was more real than that.  But it was true that it was only their minds that met.  And it seemed to be true that in the realm of mind they were content to live.  Had they, like herself, deep labyrinthine, half-lit caverns down underneath those north-lighted, logically ordered apartments where Rose always found them?  If they had they never let her or one another suspect it.

They’d be capable of deciding the great issue between herself and Rodney, if ever they were told the story, in a half dozen brisk sentences.  Rose would be held to have been right and Rodney wrong, demonstrably.  Rose, illogically, perhaps, shrank from that conclusion or at least from having it reached that way.  There was more to it than that.  There were elements in the situation they wouldn’t know how to allow for.

But Alice Perosini, she thought, was different.  She’d be able to make some of those allowances.  Rose didn’t tell her the story but she felt that at a pinch she could and this feeling was enough to establish Alice on a different basis from the others.  It was with Alice that she discussed the more personal sort of problems that arose in connection with her new job. (One of these, as you are to be told, was highly personal.) And when the question came up of finding the capital that would enable her to make the Shumans a bid on all the costumes for Come On In it was Alice, who, with all the sang-froid in the world, sketched out the articles of partnership and brought her in a certified check for three thousand dollars.

The fact that they had become partners served, somehow, to divert a relation between them which might otherwise have developed into a first-class friendship.  Not that they quarreled or even disappointed each other in the close contacts of the day’s work.  They were admirably complementary.  Alice had the business acumen, the executive grasp, the patient willingness to master details, which were needed to set Rose free for the more imaginative part of the enterprise.  Both were immensely determined on success.  Alice couldn’t have been keener about it if every cent she had in the world had been embarked in the business.