e or four
nights later, at an opera dinner at the Heaton-Duncans, she fired it off
shamelessly, as a shot out of her own locker.

"It's all very well," she exploded, "to say that Rose can't come back.
But as a matter of fact she's never been out of it. At least the hole
she left has never closed up. You all agree that she's to be forgotten
and treated as a regrettable incident, but you keep on talking about
her. It's like Roosevelt. There she is all the time."

She didn't dare catch John's eye for the next twenty minutes, but she
knew precisely, without looking, the exasperated quality of his stare.

It was true. They couldn't let her alone. Speculation flared up again,
and this time with a justifiable basis, when it became known that
Rodney had bought the McCrea house; bought it outright, for cash, with
its complete contents.

Of course everybody knew that Rodney was getting rich. And he was doing
it, as Frank Crawford pointed out to Constance, with precisely the same
contemptuous disregard of money that he had shown before his marriage.

"He doesn't care what he charges, and he didn't care then. Only then it
was out of the little end of the horn, and now it's out of the big. And
the thing that seems to make him particularly wild is that the higher
the price he puts on his opinions, the more people there are who think
that nobody's opinion but his is any good. So he just grins at them and
goes up another notch. He's no better a lawyer, he says, than he was
when his practise brought him in ten thousand a year. Of course he is a
better lawyer. He's getting better all the time. He does deliver the
goods. And fighting out these great big cases really educates a man. You
can't be really first-class unless you've got first-class things to do.
And down inside Rodney knows that as well as anybody.

"Only, with all his money, after the way he's talked about that
house--the way he's damned it and made fun of it, what did he want to go
and buy it for?"

Constance had an idea he'd got it at a bargain. The McCreas had made a
flying trip home just to sell it. Their investments had gone off, it
seemed, still further, and besides, Florence had at last found something
in the world to be in earnest about, and that was in France; the
American hospital. Florence had already taken an emergency training
course in nursing. Her husband, whose one marked talent was that of a
chauffeur, was going to drive a motor ambulance, and they were