She had taken him to a studio tea in the upper sixties just off West End Avenue, the proprietors of the studio being a tousled, bearded, blond anarchist of a painter and his exceedingly pretty, smart, frivolous-looking wife—­who had more sense than she was willing to let appear.  They had lived in Paris for years, but the fact that he had a German-sounding name had driven them back to New York.  It was through Gertrude that Rose had got acquainted with them—­she having wrung from Abe Shuman permission for the painter to prowl around back-stage and make notes for a series of queerly lighted pictures of chorus-girls and dancers—­“Degas—­and then some,” as his admirers said.  Gertrude was at the tea and two or three others.  It wasn’t a party.

The two men had instinctively drawn controversial swords almost at sight of each other and for the hour and a half that they were together the combat raged mightily, to the unmixed satisfaction of both participants.  The feelings of the bystanders were perhaps more diverse, but Rose, at least, enjoyed herself thoroughly, not only over seeing her husband’s big, formidable, finely poised mind in action again, but over a change that had taken place in the nature of some of his ideas.  The talk, of course, ranged everywhere:  Socialism, feminism, law and its crimes, art and the social mind.  Gertrude took a hand in it now and then, and it was something Rodney said to her, in answer to a remark about dependent wives, that really made Rose sit up.

“Wives aren’t dependents,” he said, “except as they let their husbands make them think they are.  Or only in very rare cases.  Certainly I don’t know of a wife who doesn’t render her husband valuable economic services in exchange for her support.  I can hardly imagine one.  Of course if they don’t recognize that these services are valuable, they can be made to feel dependent all right.”

Gertrude demurred.  She was willing to admit that a wife who took care of a husband’s house, cooked his meals, brought up his children, did him an economic service and that if she didn’t feel that she was earning her way in the world it was because she had been imposed on.  But here in New York, anyway—­she didn’t know how it might be out in Chicago—­one didn’t have to resort to his imagination to conjure up a wife who rendered none of these services whatever.  “They live, thousands of them, in smart up-town apartments, don’t do a lick of work, choke up Fifth Avenue with their limousines in the afternoon, dress like birds of paradise, or as near to it as they can come, dine with their husbands in the restaurants, go to the first nights, eat lobster Newburg afterward, and spend the next morning in bed getting over it.  Those that can’t afford that kind of life scrape along giving the best imitation of it they know how.  Thousands of them—­thousands and thousands.  If they aren’t dependents ...”