Were they all like that; at least
all the best of them? Did a man, as long as he lived, need somebody in
the role of--mother? The thought all but suffocated her.

She did not return Galbraith's confidences with any detailed account of
her own life, and the one great emotional experience of it that seemed
to have absorbed all the rest and drawn it up into itself. But she had a
comforting sense that, scanty as was the framework of facts he had to go
on, he knew, somehow, all about it; all the essentials of it; knew
infinitely more about her than Alice Perosini did, although from time to
time she had told Alice a good deal.

Spring came on them with a rush that year; swept a vivid flush of green
over the parks and squares, all in a day; pumped the sap up madly into
the little buds, so that they could hardly swell fast enough, and burst
at last into a perfectly riotous fanfare through the shrubberies. It
pumped blood, too, as well as sap, and made hearts flutter to strange
irregular rhythms with the languorous insolence of its perfumes, and the
soft caressing pressures of its south wind.

It worried Rose nearly mad. She was bound to have gone slack anyway; to
have experienced the well-earned, honest lassitude of a finished
struggle and an achieved victory. Dane & Company had any amount of work
in sight, to be sure--a success of such triumphant proportions as they
had had with _Come On In_, made that inevitable--but it would be months
before any of the new work was wanted.

Alice, who could see plainly enough that something was the matter, kept
urging Rose to run away somewhere for a long vacation. Why not, if it
came to that, put in a few weeks in London and Paris? She was almost
sure to pick up some valuable ideas over there. Rose declined that
suggestion almost sharply. If she'd had any practical training as a
nurse, she'd go over to Paris and stay, but to use that magnificently
courageous tragic city as a source of ideas for a Shuman _revue_ was out
of the question. As for the quiet place in the Virginia mountains,
which Alice had suggested as an alternative, Rose would die of ennui
there within three days. The only thing to do was to stick to her
routine as well as she could, and worry along.

These weren't reasons that she gave Alice, they were excuses. The
reason, which she tried to avoid stating, even to herself, was that she
couldn't bear the thought of going one step farther away from Rodney
than she was alre