Portia had been quite right in saying that she had never had to do anything; the rallying of all her forces under the spur of necessity was an experience she had never undergone.  And it was also true that her mother, and for that matter, Portia herself had spoiled her a lot—­had run about doing little things for her, come in and shut down her windows in the morning, and opened the register, and on any sort of excuse, on a Saturday morning, for example, had brought her her breakfast on a tray.

But these things had been favors, not services—­never to be asked for, of course, and always to be accepted a little apologetically.  She never knew what it was really to be served, until she and Rodney came back from their camp in the woods.  The whole mechanism of ringing bells for people, telling them, quite courteously of course, but with no spare words, precisely what she wanted them to do and seeing them, with no words at all of their own, except the barest minimum required to indicate respectful acquiescence—­carrying out these instructions, was in its novelty, as sensuously delightful a thing to her feelings as the contact with a fine fabric was to her finger-tips.

“I haven’t,” Rose, in bed, told Rodney one morning, “a single, blessed, mortal thing to do all day.”  Some fixture scheduled for that morning had been moved, she went on to explain, and Eleanor Randolph was feeling seedy and had called off a little luncheon and matinee party.  So, she concluded with a deep-drawn sigh, the day was empty.

“Oh, that’s too bad,” he said with concern.  “Can’t you manage something ...?”

“Too bad!” said Rose in lively dissent.  “It’s too heavenly!  I’ve got a whole day just to enjoy being myself;—­being”—­she reached across to the other bed for his hand, and getting it, stroked her cheek with it—­“being my new self.  You’ve no idea how new it is, or how exciting all the little things about it are.  State Street’s so different now—­going and getting the exact thing I want, instead of finding something I can make do, and then faking it up to look as much like the real thing as I could.  Portia used to think I faked pretty well.  It was the one thing she really admired about me, because she couldn’t do it herself at all.  But I never was—­don’t you know?—­right.

“And then when I was going anywhere, I’d figure out the through routes and where I’d take transfers, and how many blocks I’d have to walk, and what kind of shoes I’d have to wear.  And coming home in time for dinner always meant the rush hour, and I’d have to stand.  And it simply never occurred to me that everybody else didn’t do it that way.  Except”—­she smiled—­“except in Robert Chambers’ novels and such.”

It wasn’t necessary to see Rose smile to know she did it.  Her voice, broadening out and—­dimpling, betrayed the fact.  This smile, plainly enough, went rather below the surface, carried a reference to something.  But Rodney didn’t interrupt.  He let her go on and waited to inquire about it later.