She never tried to explain to herself the feeling that imposed this
reticence on her, until the discovery that it didn't exist toward Alice.
She couldn't have feared that they would not approve of what she had
done; it squared so exactly with all their ideas. Indeed the one real
bond between them was a common revolt against the traditional notion
that the way for a woman to effect her will in the world was by
"influencing" a man. They wanted to hold the world in their own hands.
They contemned the "feminine" arts of cajolery. They wanted no odds from
anybody. There wasn't a real man-hater in the crowd, they were too
normal and healthy for that. But they didn't talk much about men; never,
as far as Rose knew, about men--as such. Was the topic suppressed, she
wondered, or was it just that they didn't think about them?

That question made her realize how little she knew of any of them; how
limited was the range of their intercourse. It was as if they met in a
sort of mental gymnasium, fenced with one another, did callisthenics.
Oh, that was going too far, of course; it was more real than that. But
it was true that it was only their minds that met. And it seemed to be
true that in the realm of mind they were content to live. Had they,
like herself, deep labyrinthine, half-lit caverns down underneath those
north-lighted, logically ordered apartments where Rose always found
them? If they had they never let her or one another suspect it.

They'd be capable of deciding the great issue between herself and
Rodney, if ever they were told the story, in a half dozen brisk
sentences. Rose would be held to have been right and Rodney wrong,
demonstrably. Rose, illogically, perhaps, shrank from that conclusion or
at least from having it reached that way. There was more to it than
that. There were elements in the situation they wouldn't know how to
allow for.

But Alice Perosini, she thought, was different. She'd be able to make
some of those allowances. Rose didn't tell her the story but she felt
that at a pinch she could and this feeling was enough to establish Alice
on a different basis from the others. It was with Alice that she
discussed the more personal sort of problems that arose in connection
with her new job. (One of these, as you are to be told, was highly
personal.) And when the question came up of finding the capital that
would enable her to make the Shumans a bid on all the costumes for _Come
On In_ it was Alice, who, w