er hair
and all to look rather exotic. Her speech, too, and the cultivated
things she could do with her shoulders, carried out the impression. She
had a trick--when she wanted to be disagreeable an ill-natured observer
would have said--of making remarks in Italian and then translating them.

She wasn't disagreeable though--not malicious anyway, and the very hard
finish she carried, had been developed probably as a matter of
protection. She must have been through a good deal in the last few
years. She'd had two children stillborn, for one thing, and she was
frankly afraid to try it again. She never wanted any sympathy from
anybody. If it came down to that, she'd prefer arsenic. She resisted
Rose's rather poignant charm, as she resisted any other appeal to her
emotions. With the charm left out, Rose was simply a well meaning,
somewhat insufficiently civilized young person, the beneficiary, through
her marriage with Rodney, of a piece of unmerited good fortune. She
didn't in the least mean to be unkind to her, however, and didn't dream
that she was giving Rose an inkling how she thought of her.

Her manner toward this new member of the family was studiously
affectionate. She avoided being either disagreeable or patronizing. Rose
could see, indeed, how carefully she avoided it. She knew, too, that
Frederica saw the same thing and tried to compensate for it by a little
extra affectionateness. She even thought--though perhaps this was mere
self-consciousness--that she detected a trace of the same thing in
Rodney.

The tie of blood is a powerful thing. Rose had never realized before how
powerful. With Harriet's arrival, she became aware of the Aldrich family
as a sodality--something she didn't belong to and never could. It was
quite true, as Frederica had said, that she and Rodney had always been
special pals. Harriet fitted into the family on the other side of
Frederica from her brother. She was a person with a good deal of what
one calls magnetism, and she attracted Frederica toward herself--made
her, when she was about, a somewhat different Frederica. She even
attracted Rodney a little in the same way.

The time of the year (it was after the end of the social season) made it
natural for them to be together a good deal. And of course Harriet's
return, after an absence of years, made them seek such meetings. The
result was that Rose, at the end of almost a year of marriage, got her
first real taste of lonesomeness. When t