minute, and then I'll come and help you pack."

BOOK THREE

The World Alone

CHAPTER I

THE LENGTH OF A THOUSAND YARDS

"Here's the first week's rent then," said Rose, handing the landlady
three dollars, "and I think you'd better give me a receipt showing till
when it's paid for. Do you know where there's an expressman who would go
for a trunk?"

The landlady had tight gray hair, a hard bitten hatchet face, and a back
that curved through a forty-degree arc between the lumbar and the
cervical vertebrae, a curve which was accentuated by the faded
longitudinal blue and white stripes--like ticking--of the dress she
wore. She had no charms, one would have said, of person, mind or manner.
But it was nevertheless true that Rose was renting this room largely on
the strength of the landlady. She was so much more humanly possible than
any of the others at whose placarded doors Rose had knocked or rung ...!

For the last year and a half, anyway since she had married Rodney
Aldrich, the surface that life had presented to her had been as bland as
velvet. She'd never been spoken to by anybody except in terms of
politeness. All the people she encountered could be included under two
categories: her friends, if one stretches the word to include all her
social acquaintances, and, in an equally broad sense, her servants; that
is to say, people who earned their living by doing things she wanted
done. Her friends' and her servants' manners were not alike, to be sure,
but as far as intent went, they came to the same thing. They presented,
whatever passions, misfortunes, dislikes, uncomfortable facts of any
sort might lie in the background, a smooth and practically frictionless,
bearing surface. A person accustomed to that surface develops a soft
skin. This was about the first of Rose's discoveries.

To be looked at with undisguised suspicion--to have a door slammed in
her face as the negative answer to a civil question, left her at first
bewildered, and then enveloped in a blaze of indignation. It was perhaps
lucky for her that this happened at the very beginning of her
pilgrimage. Because, with that fire once alight within her, Rose could
go through anything. The horrible fawning, leering landlady whom she had
encountered later, might have turned her sick, but for that fine steady
glow. The hatchet-faced one she had finally arrived at, made no
protestations of her own respectability, and she seemed, though rather
re