It didn’t occur to her to ask how much the rent would be, nor would the fact have had any value for her as an illuminant, because she would have had no idea whether six thousand dollars was a half or a hundredth of her future husband’s income.  The new house was just a part—­as so many of the other things that had happened to her since that night when Rodney had sent her flowers and taken her to the theater and two restaurants in Martin’s biggest limousine had been parts—­of a breath-arresting fairy story.

It takes a consciousness of resistance overcome to make anything feel quite real, and Rose, during the first three months after their return to town in the autumn, encountered no resistance whatever.  It was all, as Frederica had said, oiled.  She was asked to make no effort.  The whole thing just happened, exactly as it had happened to Cinderella.  All she had to do was to watch with wonder-wide eyes, and feel that she was, deliciously, being floated along.

The conclusion Frederica and Violet had come to about her chance for social success was amply justified by the event, and it is probable that Violet had put her finger on the mainspring of it.  One needn’t assume that there were not other young women at the prince’s ball as beautiful as Cinderella, and other gowns, perhaps, as marvelous as the one provided by the fairy godmother.  The godmother’s greatest gift, I should say, though the fable lays little stress on it, was a capacity for unalloyed delight.  No other young girl, beautiful as she may have been, if she were accustomed to driving to balls in coaches and having princes ask her to dance with them, could possibly have looked at that prince the way Cinderella must have looked at him.

While a sophisticated woman can affect this sort of simplicity well enough to take in the men, the affectation is always transparently clear to other women and they detest her for it.  But it was altogether the real thing with Rose, and they knew it and took to her as naturally as the men did.

So it fell out that what with the Junior League, the woman’s auxiliary boards of one or two of the more respectably elect charities, the Thursday Club and The Whifflers (this was the smallest and smartest organization of the lot—­fifteen or twenty young women supposed to combine and reconcile social and intellectual brilliancy on even terms.  They met at one another’s houses and read scintillating papers about nothing whatever under titles selected generally from Through the Looking-glass or The Hunting of the Snark)—­what with all this, her days were quite as full as the evenings were, when she and Rodney dined and went to the opera and paid fabulous prices to queer professionals, to keep themselves abreast of the minute in all the new dances.

But it wasn’t merely the events of this sort, sitting in boxes at the opera and going to marvelous supper dances afterward, that had this thrilling quality of incredibility to Rose.  The connective tissue of her life gave her the same sensation, perhaps even more strongly.