y. Then in the morning, you wake
up a wiser man. Wise enough to forget what a damned fool you've been.
You don't want to forget that, Aldrich. You've been drunk and you've
talked like a damned fool. And I've been drunk and I've talked like a
damned fool. But we'll both be wiser in the morning."

Rodney walked home that night like a man dazed. The vividness of one
blazing idea blinded him. The thing that Randolph had seen and lacked
the courage to do; the thing Rodney despised him for a coward for having
failed to do, that thing Rose had done. Line by line, the parallel
presented itself to him, as the design comes through in a half-developed
photographic plate.

Without knowing it, yielding to a blind, unscrutinized instinct, he'd
wanted Rose to live on his love. He'd tried to smooth things out for
her, anticipate her wants. He'd wanted her soft, helpless, dependent. As
a trophy? That was what Randolph had said. Had he been as bad as that?
From what other desire of his than that could have come the sting of
exasperation he'd always felt when she'd urged him to let her work for
him; help him to economize, dust and make beds, so that he could go on
writing his book? She'd seen, even then, something he'd been blind
to--something he'd blinded himself to; that love, by itself, was not
enough. That it could poison, as well as feed.

And, seeing, she had the courage ... He pressed his hands against his
eyes.

When there could be friendship as well as love between them, she said,
she'd come back. Would she come back now, even for his friendship? He
doubted it. Dared not hope. There came up before him that face of frozen
agony that had confronted him in the room on Clark Street, and he
remembered what she'd said then--with a shudder--about it all ending
"like this." Ending!

His love had played her false; had tried, instinctively, to smother her,
and defeated at that, had outraged and tortured her. She couldn't
possibly look at it any way but that. And now that she was free,
self-discovered, victorious, was it likely she would submit to its blind
caprices again? The thing Randolph had said was his notion of Heaven,
she'd triumphantly attained. Wouldn't it be her notion of Heaven too?

But she had won, among the rest of her spoils of victory, the thing she
had originally set out to get. His friendship and respect. Friendship,
he remembered her saying, was a thing you had to earn. When you'd earned
it, it couldn't be withhel