find Rose there with her. She'd felt--she
couldn't have helped feeling after the things he'd said to her that
ghastly night in the little North Clark Street room--that she couldn't
go on. And stripped of her job like that, with nothing else to turn to,
where should she go but home to her mother and sister? To the only
friends and comforters she had in the world.

He'd send no word in advance of his coming. He'd just come up to the
door of the little bungalow and ring the bell. And there was a chance
that the person who'd come to answer it would be Rose herself.

The idea came to him all in a flash as he walked away from the theater,
and his impulse from it was to jump into a taxicab and catch a
ten-thirty train to the coast, that he had just time for. He denied the
impulse as part of the discipline he'd been imposing on himself since
his talk with Harriet, and went home instead. From now on he was going
to act like a reasonable man, not like a distracted one.

He had his bag packed and his tickets bought the next morning, went to
the office and put things in train to accommodate a week's absence,
wrote a note to Frederica telling her of his discovery that Rose had
left the company of _The Girl Up-stairs_, and of his hope of finding her
in California with her mother and Portia; and when he settled himself in
his compartment for the three-day ride he even had two or three books in
his bag to pass the time with, as if it had been an ordinary journey. He
didn't make much of them, it's true, but his honest attempt to, gave him
the glimmering dawn of a discovery.

The cardinal principle of his life, if such a thing could be stated in a
phrase, was self-expression through self-discipline. Well, his discovery
was (it didn't come to much more than a surmise, it is true, but it was
a beginning) that in his relations to Rose he'd never disciplined
himself at all. The network of his instincts, passions, desires, that
had involved her, had been allowed to grow unchecked, unscrutinized. He
didn't begin to scrutinize them now. He was in no mind for the task. How
could he undertake it until the fearful hope that he was actually on the
way to her now should have been answered one way or the other!

It proved a vain hope. The person who answered his ring at the door of
the little bungalow, on that wonderful sun-bathed, rose-scented morning
(false auguries that mocked his disappointment and made it almost
intolerable) was Portia.