Dion, of course, knew of this friendship; and so did Rosamund.  She never made any comment upon it, and showed no interest in it.  But her life that autumn was a full one.  She had Robin; she had the house to look after, “my little house”; she had Dion in the evenings; she had quantities of friends and acquaintances; and she had her singing.  She had now definitely given up singing professionally.  Her very short career as an artist was closed.  But she had begun to practise diligently again, and showed by this assiduity that she loved music not for what she could gain by it, but for its own sake.  Of her friends and acquaintances she saw much less than formerly.  Many of them complained that they never could get a glimpse of her now, that she shut them out, that “not at home” had become a parrot-cry on the lips of her well-trained parlor-maid, that she cared for nobody now that she had a husband and a baby, that she was self-engrossed, etc., etc.  But they could not be angry with her; for if they did happen to meet her, or if she did happen to be “at home” when they called, they always found her the genial, radiant, kind and friendly Rosamund of old; full, apparently, of all the former interest in them and their doings, eager to welcome and make the most of their jokes and good stories, sympathetic towards their troubles and sorrows.  To Dion she once said in explanation of her withdrawal from the rather bustling life which keeping up with many friends and acquaintances implies: 

“I think one sometimes has to make a choice between living deeply in the essentials and just paddling up to one’s ankles in the non-essentials.  I want to live deeply if I can, and I am very happy in quiet.  I can hear only in peace the voices that mean most to me.”

“I remember what you said to me once in the Acropolis,” he answered.

“What was that?”

“You said, ’Oh, Dion, if you knew how something in me cares for freshness and for peace.’”

“You remember my very words!”

“Yes.”

“Then you understand?”

“And besides,” he said slowly, and as if with some hesitation, “you used to long for a very quiet life, for the religious life; didn’t you?”

“Once, but it seems such ages ago.”

“And yet Robin’s not a year old yet.”

She looked at him with a sudden, and almost intense, inquiry; he was smiling at her.

“Robino maestro di casa!” he added.

And they both laughed.

Towards the end of November one day Daventry said to Dion in the Greville Club: 

“Beatrice is going to give a dinner somewhere, probably at the Carlton.  She thought of the twenty-eighth.  Are Rosamund and you engaged that night?  She wants you, of course.”

“No.  We don’t go out much.  Rose is an early rooster, as she calls it.”

“Then the twenty-eighth would do capitally.”

“Shall I tell Rose?”