n independent
business; the new partnership with Alice Perosini, with the details of
which, through Jimmy Wallace, you are already sufficiently acquainted.
By the time that happened the friendship had gone so far that Rose's
chief reluctance in making the change sprang from a fear that the change
would interrupt it.

But the thing worked the other way. Released from the compulsory
relation of employer and employee, they frankly sought each other as
friends, and found that they got more out of a half-hour together over a
hasty lunch than a whole day's struggle over a common task had given
them.

There were long stretches of days, of course, when they saw nothing of
each other, and Rose, so long as she had plenty to do, was never
conscious of missing him. She never, in the course of her own day's
work, made an unconscious reference to him, as she was always making
them to Rodney. But the prospect of an empty Sunday morning, for
instance, was always enormously brightened if he called up to say that
it was empty for him, too, and shouldn't they go for a walk or a ferry
ride somewhere.

He did the greater part of the talking. Told her, a good deal to his own
surprise, stories of his early life in London--a chapter he'd never
been willing to refer to, except in the vaguest terms, to anybody else.
He told her, too, with more and more freedom and explicitness, as he
discovered how straight and honest her mind was, how eager it was for
facts instead of for sentimental refractions of them, about certain
emotional adventures of his as he was emerging into manhood, and of the
marks they had left on him.

All told, she learned more about men, as such, from him than ever she
had learned, consciously at least, from Rodney. She'd never been able to
regard her husband as a specimen. He was Rodney, _sui generis_, and it
had never occurred to her either to generalize from him to other men, or
to explain any of the facts she had noted about him, on the mere ground
of his masculinity. She began doing that now a little, and the exercise
opened her eyes.

In many ways Galbraith and her husband were a good deal alike. Both were
rough, direct, a little remorseless, and there was in both of them,
right alongside the best and finest and clearest things they had, an
unaccountable vein of childishness. She'd never been willing to call it
by that name in Rodney. But when she saw it in Galbraith, too, she
wondered. Was that just the man of it?