“So you see,” she concluded, “it’s quite an adventure just to say—­well, that I want the car at a quarter to eleven and to tell Otto exactly where I want him to drive me to.  I always feel as if I ought to say that if he’ll just stop the car at the corner of Diversey Street, I can walk.”

He laughed out at that and asked her how long she thought this blissful state of things would last.

“Forever,” she said.

But presently she propped herself up on one elbow and looked over at him rather thoughtfully.  “Of course it’s none of it new to you,” she said—­“not the silly little things I’ve been talking about, nor the things we do together—­oh, the dinners, and the dances, and the operas.  Do you sort of—­wish I’d get tired of it?  Is it a dreadful bore to you?”

“So long as it doesn’t bore you,” he said; “so long as you go on—­shining the way you do over it, and I am where I can see you shine”—­he got out of his bed, sat down on the edge of hers, and took both her hands—­“so long as it’s like that, you wonder,” he said, “well, the dinners and the operas and all that may be piffle, but I shall be blind to the fact.”

She kissed his hands and told him contentedly that he was a darling.  But, after a moment’s silence, a little frown puckered her eyebrows and she asked him what he was so solemn about.

Well, he had told her the truth.  The edge of excitement in his voice would have carried the irresistible conviction to anybody, that the thing he had said was, without reserve, the very thing he meant.  But precisely as he said it, as if, indeed, the thing that he had said were the detonating charge that fires the shell, he felt the impact, away down in the inner depths of him, of a realization that he was not the same man he had been six months ago.  Not the man who had tramped impatiently back and forth across Frederica’s drawing-room, expounding his ideals of space and leisure—­open, wind-swept space, for the free range of a hard, clean, athletic mind.  Not the man who despised the clutter of expensive junk—­“so many things to have and to do, that one couldn’t turn around for fear of breaking something.”  That man would have derided the possibility that he could ever say this thing that he, still Rodney Aldrich, had just said to Rose—­and meant.

To that man, the priceless hour of the day had always been precisely this one, the first waking hour, when his mind, in the enjoyment of a sort of clairvoyant limpidity, had been wont to challenge its stiffest problems, wrestle with them, and whether triumphant or not, despatch him to his office avid for the day’s work and strides ahead of where he had left it the night before.

He spent that hour very differently now.  He spent all his hours, even the formal working ones, differently.  And the terrifying thing was that he hadn’t resisted the change, hadn’t wanted to resist, didn’t want to now, as he sat there looking down at her—­at the wonderful hair which framed her face and, in its two thick braids, the incomparable whiteness of her throat and bosom—­at the slumberous glory of her eyes.