into his face, her eyes searching it as his were
searching hers, luminously and with a swiftly kindling fire. Her lips
parted a little, trembling. There was a sort of bloom on her skin that
became more visible as the blood, wave on wave, came flushing in behind
it. His vision of her swam suddenly away in a blur as his own eyes
filled up with tears.

And then, with that little sob in her throat, she came to him. "Oh,
Roddy ... Roddy!" was all she said. With her own lithe arms she strained
his embrace the tighter.

So far as the superstructures of their two lives were concerned,--the
part of them that floated above the level of consciousness, the whole
fabric of their thoughts and theories and ideals, that made them to
their friends and to each other, and very largely to themselves, Rose
and Rodney,--they were as far apart as on the day she had left his
house. There hadn't been, since then, a word between them of argument or
compromise. The great _impasse_ was still unforced. He hadn't, as yet,
shown that he could give her the friendship she demanded. She'd had no
chance to tell him of any of the small triumphs and disciplines of her
new life that she hoped would win it from him.

And as for Rodney, he was the same man who, an hour ago, in the theater,
had raged and writhed under what he felt to be an invasion of his
proprietary rights in her.

He wouldn't have defined it that way, to be sure, in a talk with Barry
Lake. Would have denied, indeed, with the best of them, that a husband
had any proprietary rights in his wife. But the intolerable sense of
having become an object of derision, or contemptuous pity, of being
disgraced and of her being degraded, through the appearance on the stage
of a public theater, of a woman who was his wife; and through her
exhibition, for pay, of charms he had always supposed would be kept for
him, couldn't derive from anything else but just that. He'd waited there
in the alley, full of bitter thoughts that were ready to leap forth in
denunciations. He'd waited there, ready, he thought, to use actual
physical force on her, in the unthinkable event of its becoming
necessary, to drag her out of this pit where he had found her, back to
his side again.

But somehow, when he had heard her speak his name, he'd begun to
tremble. And when he had felt her trembling, too, the bitter phrases had
died on his tongue and the thoughts that propelled them were smothered
like fire under sand. And as