d from you. Well, it was right she should be
told that; made to understand it to the full. He couldn't ask her to
come back to him. But she must know that her respect was as necessary
now to him, as she'd once said his was to her. He must tell her that. He
must see her and tell her that.

He stopped abruptly in his walk. His bones, as the Psalmist said, turned
to water. How should he confront that gaze of hers, which knew so much
and understood so deeply--he with the memory of his two last ignominious
encounters with her, behind him?

CHAPTER III

FRIENDS

Except for the vacuum where the core and heart of it all ought to have
been, Rose's life in New York during the year that put her on the high
road to success as a designer of costumes for the theater, was a good
life, broadening, stimulating, seasoning. It rested, to begin with, on a
foundation of adequate material comfort which the unwonted physical
privations of the six months that preceded it--the room on Clark Street,
the nightmare tour on the road, and even the little back room in Miss
Gibbons' apartment over the drug-store in Centropolis--made seem like
positive luxury.

After a preliminary fortnight in a little hotel off Washington Square,
which she had heard Jane Lake speak of once as a possible place for a
respectable young woman of modest means to live in, she found an
apartment in Thirteenth Street, not far west of Sixth Avenue. It was in
a quiet block of old private residences. But this building was clean and
new, with plenty of white tile and modern plumbing, and an elevator. Her
apartment had two rooms in it, one of them really spacious to poor Rose
after what she'd been taking for granted lately, besides a nice white
bathroom and a kitchenette. She paid thirty-seven dollars a month for
it, and five dollars a month for a share in a charwoman who came in
every day and made her bed and washed up dishes.

The extensiveness of this domestic establishment frightened her a little
at first. But she reassured herself with the reflection that under the
rule Gertrude Morse had quoted to her, one week's pay for one month's
rent, she still had a comfortable margin. She furnished it a bit at a
time, with articles chosen in the order of their indispensability, and
she went on, during the summer, to buy some things which were not
indispensable at all. But not very many. Like most persons with a highly
specialized creative talent for one form of beauty (i