“There’s another reason,” he went on.  “I’ve a notion that the thing we’re after is about the finest thing there is.  If that’s so, we’ll have to pay for it, in one way or another.  But we aren’t going to worry about it.  We’ll just go ahead—­and see what happens.”

“Do you remember when you said that before?” asked Rose.  “You told me that marriage was an adventure anyway, and that the only thing to do was to try it—­and see what happened.”

He grunted.  “The real adventure’s just begun,” he said.

“Anyhow,” she murmured drowsily, “you can talk to me again.  Just as if we weren’t married.”

* * * * *

And there is just about where they stand to-day—­at the beginning, or hardly past the beginning, of what he spoke of as their real adventure; they are going forward prepared to make the best of it and see what happens.

What did happen within two or three days after this last conversation of theirs that I have chronicled was that Rose went back with Rodney and the twins to Chicago, stayed there only until Miss French could be summoned back from her vacation, and then went on to New York to a badly worried Alice and the now extremely urgent affairs of Dane & Company.

Summer is a slack time for a lawyer, of course, since judges are gentlemen who like long vacations.  So Rodney persuaded Rose to take a bigger apartment in the same building and to put a card in the mail-box that would account for him as well as for herself.  He came down pretty often, and always had, it must be owned, a rather hard time of it.  The spectacle of Rose driving along an ungodly number of hours a day while he idled about doing nothing was one he found it hard to get used to.  It didn’t altogether reconcile him to it to have her point out that there were times when he drove like that.  They had two or three good Sundays, though; one of them out on Long Island with John Galbraith—­a meeting and the beginning of a friendship that Rose had been very keen to bring about.

Her work ended with a terrific climax in September, just about as his began, and Rose came back to Chicago, spent a joyous month with the twins and with the little of Rodney his office could spare of him.  Then, taking the babies and their nurse with her, she went out to California to see her mother and Portia.

Without any special incentive, just the natural desire of a daughter and a sister for reunion after so long a parting would have taken her there.

But Rose had a special incentive.  She wanted to talk to Portia.  They hadn’t had a real talk since that devastating day—­ages ago—­when, yielding to an impulse of passionate self-revelation, Portia had exhibited her great sacrifice and her equally great, though thwarted desire; had said to Rose, “I am the branch they cut off so that you could grow.  You’re living my life as well as yours.  The only thing I ever could hate you for would be for failing.”  She wanted to tell Portia how the life she had given up the chance of living had grown in her sister’s trust.  She wanted Portia’s, “Well done.”