In many ways Galbraith and her husband were a good deal alike.  Both were rough, direct, a little remorseless, and there was in both of them, right alongside the best and finest and clearest things they had, an unaccountable vein of childishness.  She’d never been willing to call it by that name in Rodney.  But when she saw it in Galbraith, too, she wondered.  Was that just the man of it?  Were they all like that; at least all the best of them?  Did a man, as long as he lived, need somebody in the role of—­mother?  The thought all but suffocated her.

She did not return Galbraith’s confidences with any detailed account of her own life, and the one great emotional experience of it that seemed to have absorbed all the rest and drawn it up into itself.  But she had a comforting sense that, scanty as was the framework of facts he had to go on, he knew, somehow, all about it; all the essentials of it; knew infinitely more about her than Alice Perosini did, although from time to time she had told Alice a good deal.

Spring came on them with a rush that year; swept a vivid flush of green over the parks and squares, all in a day; pumped the sap up madly into the little buds, so that they could hardly swell fast enough, and burst at last into a perfectly riotous fanfare through the shrubberies.  It pumped blood, too, as well as sap, and made hearts flutter to strange irregular rhythms with the languorous insolence of its perfumes, and the soft caressing pressures of its south wind.

It worried Rose nearly mad.  She was bound to have gone slack anyway; to have experienced the well-earned, honest lassitude of a finished struggle and an achieved victory.  Dane & Company had any amount of work in sight, to be sure—­a success of such triumphant proportions as they had had with Come On In, made that inevitable—­but it would be months before any of the new work was wanted.

Alice, who could see plainly enough that something was the matter, kept urging Rose to run away somewhere for a long vacation.  Why not, if it came to that, put in a few weeks in London and Paris?  She was almost sure to pick up some valuable ideas over there.  Rose declined that suggestion almost sharply.  If she’d had any practical training as a nurse, she’d go over to Paris and stay, but to use that magnificently courageous tragic city as a source of ideas for a Shuman revue was out of the question.  As for the quiet place in the Virginia mountains, which Alice had suggested as an alternative, Rose would die of ennui there within three days.  The only thing to do was to stick to her routine as well as she could, and worry along.

These weren’t reasons that she gave Alice, they were excuses.  The reason, which she tried to avoid stating, even to herself, was that she couldn’t bear the thought of going one step farther away from Rodney than she was already.

A letter from him was always in the first Saturday morning delivery and she never left for her atelier till she got it.  She had perceived, what he had not, the steadily growing friendliness of these letters.  It wasn’t a made-up thing, either.  He was not telling her things because he thought she’d like to be told, but because it had insensibly become a need of his to tell her.