the things they're too anxious
to show you they understand, and the things they dare admit they never
heard of--you can tell every time. Find out all you want to know about
anybody in an hour!"

Rose, it seemed, reacted satisfactorily to her tests, since she was
introduced as rapidly thereafter as their scanty leisure made possible,
to Gertrude's more immediate circle of friends.

During that first winter, she enjoyed them immensely. They were all
interesting; all "did things"; widely various things, yet, somehow,
related. There was a red-haired fire-brand whose specialty seemed to be
bailing out girls arrested for picketing and whose Sunday diversion
consisted in going down to Paterson, New Jersey, making the police
ridiculous and unhappy for an hour or so, delivering herself of a speech
in defiance of their preventive efforts and finally escaping arrest by a
hair's breadth. They got her finally but since she enjoyed the privilege
of addressing as Uncle a man whose name was uttered with awe about the
corner of Broad Street and Exchange Place, they had to let her go.

There was a young woman lawyer, associated with Gertrude in an
organization for getting jobs for girls who had just been let out of
jail, a level-headed enterprise, which by conserving its efforts for
those who really wished to benefit by them, managed to accomplish a good
deal. One of their circle was associate editor of a popular magazine and
another wrote short stories, mostly about shop-girls. The last one of
them for Rose to meet, she having been out of town all summer, was
Alice Perosini. She was the daughter of a rich Italian Jew, a
beautiful--really a wonderful person to look at--but a little
unaccountable, especially with the gorgeous clothes she wore, in their
circle. Rose took her time about deciding that she liked her but ended
by preferring her to all the rest. She never talked much; would smoke
and listen, making most of her comments in pantomime, but she had a
trick of capping a voluble discussion with a hard-chiseled phrase which,
whether you felt it precisely fitted or not, you found it difficult to
escape from.

What forced Rose to a realization of her preference for Alice was the
impulse to tell her who she really was and the suddenly following
reflection that she never had wanted to tell any of the others; that she
had taken care to avoid all reference to the husband and the babies she
had fled from in search of a life of her own.