rying to decide a question like that. What I'm interested
in is what can be done about it. It's not a very nice situation. Nobody
likes it--at least I should _think_ Rose would be pretty sick of it by
now. She may have been crazy for a stage career, but she's probably seen
that the chorus of a third-rate musical comedy won't take her anywhere.

"The thing's simply a mess, and the only thing to do, is to clear it up
as quickly and as decently as we can--and it can be cleared up, if we go
at it right. Only, for the love of Heaven, Freddy, before you let Rod go
out of the house, give him a dose of veronal and pack him off to a quiet
room up-stairs to sleep around the clock! The way he looks now, he's a
proclamation of calamity across the street!"

She wasn't at all disturbed by the outburst this provoked from Rodney.
Indeed, Frederica, from a glimpse she got of her face as she sat
listening to his blistering denunciation of this apparently
whole-hearted concern for appearances, and his passionate denial that
they meant anything at all to him, suspected that her sister's words
had been calculated to produce just this result. When it had subsided,
Harriet's first words proved it.

[Illustration: "What earthly thing does it matter whose fault it is?"]

"All right," she observed. "I knew you'd want to say that. Now, it's off
your mind. Appearances do matter to Freddy and me, and of course they
matter to you too, though you don't like to think so. They matter to all
our kind of people. We're supposed to have been trained to take our
medicine without making faces. If we've got cuts and sores and bruises,
we cover them. We don't parade them as a bid for sympathy. We leave
howling about rights and wrongs and soul-mates and affinities and
'ideals,' to the shabby sort of people who like to do that shabby sort
of thing. According to our traditions, the decent thing to do is to shut
up and keep your face and make it possible for other people to keep
theirs. You're as strong for that as I am, really, Rod, and that's why I
want you to back me up in the line I took with Constance. Pretend you've
known all about what Rose was doing, and that you aren't ashamed of it.
It would have been easier, of course, if she'd played fair with us at
the start ..."

"She did play fair," he interrupted. "She offered to tell me what she
was going to do. I wouldn't let her."

Harriet's only commentary on this was a faint shrug.

"Anyhow," she went o