her.

"No," he insisted, "it wasn't just talk. There was something to it.
Afterward, when we were engaged, two or three times, you gave me tips
about things. And since we've been married ... Well, somehow, I've had
the feeling that you were on her side; that you saw things her
way--things that I didn't see."

"Little things," she protested; "little tiny things that couldn't
possibly matter--things that any woman would be on another
woman's--side, as you say, about."

But she contradicted this statement at once. "Oh, I _did_ love her!" she
said fiercely. "Not just because she loved you, but because I thought
she was altogether adorable. I couldn't help it. And of course that's
what makes me so perfectly furious now--that she should have done a
thing like this to you."

"All right," he said. "Never mind about that. This is what I want you to
do. I want you to go to see her, and I want you to ask her, in the first
place, to try to forgive me."

"What for?" Frederica demanded.

"I want you to tell her," he went on, "that it's impossible that she
should be more horrified at the thing I did than I am myself. I want you
to ask her, whatever she thinks my deserts are, to do just one thing for
me, and that is to let me take her out of that perfectly hideous place.
I don't ask anything else but that. She can make any terms she likes.
She can live where or how she likes. Only--not like that. Maybe it's a
deserved punishment, but I can't stand it!"

There was the crystallization of what little thinking he had managed to
do in the two purgatorial days he'd spent in that down-state hotel--in
the intervals of fighting off the torturing jingle of that tune, and the
memory of the dull frozen agony he'd seen in Rose's face as he left her.
No great result, truly. The mountain had labored and brought forth a
mouse.

But reflect for a moment what Rodney's life had been; how gently, for
all his buoyant theories about the acceptance of discipline, the world,
in its material aspect at any rate, had dealt with him. How completely
that boyish arrogance of his had been allowed to grow unbruised by
circumstance. He'd always been rich, in the sense that his means had
always been sufficient to his wants. He'd never in his life had an
experience that even resembled Portia's with that old unpaid grocery
bill. He'd enjoyed wearing shabby clothes, but he'd never worn them
because he could afford no better. He'd always been democratic in the