his wife's snatched him
out of that beatific abstraction.

"No, there is not," he said.

The tone of his voice was a good deal more familiar to his fellow
directors in some of his enterprises, than it was to his wife. She
looked at him as if she couldn't quite believe she'd understood.

"There is not what?" she asked.

"There is not a thing that we can do or are going to do about Rose and
Rodney. We did something once before and made a mess of it. This time
we're going to let them alone. They're both of age and of sound mind,
and they've got each other's addresses. If they want to get together
again, they will."

* * * * *

"I've had a perfectly bang-up evening," said Jimmy to Violet a little
later when he took his leave.

"I know you have," she said dryly. Then, with a change of manner, "But I
have, too, Jimmy. You believe that, don't you?"

"Sure I do," he said, and shook hands with her all over again. Violet
was a good sort.

Riding home in the elevated train, Jimmy Wallace hummed what he
conceived to be a tune. And when he did that ...!

CHAPTER II

A BROKEN PARALLEL

None of the speculative explanations Rodney's friends advanced for his
having bought that precious solemn house of the McCreas, together with
all its rarified esthetic furniture, exactly covered the ground. He
didn't buy it in the expectation that Rose was coming back to live in
it, and still less with the even remote notion of finding a successor to
her. He hadn't bought it because it was a bargain. He had very little
idea whether it was a bargain or not. And if there was a grain of truth
in John Williamson's explanation, Rodney was only vaguely aware of it.

He'd have said, if he'd set about formulating an explanation, that he
bought the house as a result of eliminating the alternatives to buying
it. Florence meant to sell it to somebody, and if he didn't buy it, he'd
have to move out. Rather disingenuously, he represented to himself that
his dislike of moving out sprang from the trouble that would be involved
in finding some other place to live in, furnishing it, reorganizing his
establishment. Really, he hadn't time for that. Frederica would have
done it for him in a minute, but he ignored that possibility.

Down underneath these shallow practical considerations, lay the fact
that such a reorganization would have been a tacit acknowledgment of
defeat; not only an acknowledgment to the world,