oubt add something--how much he didn't dare to try to
estimate--to her happiness, to know that all was going well in the home
that she had left.

She began pretty soon to answer these letters with stiff little notes,
strictly limited to a bulletin of her own activities and a grateful
acknowledgment of the latest one he had sent her. Invariably, every
Tuesday morning, one of these notes arrived. And this state of things
continued, unchanged, for months.

He experienced a bewildering mixture of emotions over these letters of
hers. They drove him, sometimes, into outbursts of petulant rage. Often
the knowledge that one of them was to be expected in the morning,
delivered him up, against all the resistance he could make, to a flood
of tormenting memories of her. And across the mood the letter would find
him in, its cool little commonplaces would sting like the cut of a whip.

The mere facts her letters recounted aroused contradictory emotions in
him, too. They all spelled success and assurance, and almost from week
to week they marked advancement. The first effect of this was always to
make his heart sink; to make her seem farther away from him; to make the
possibility of any future need of him that would give him his
opportunity, seem more and more remote. The other feeling, whose glow he
was never conscious of till later--a feeling so surprising and
irrational that he could hardly call it by name, was pride. What in
God's name had he to be proud of? Was she a possession of his? Could he
claim any credit for her success? But the glow persisted in spite of
these questions.

His satisfaction in his own letters to her was less mixed. They must, he
thought, gradually be restoring in her mind, the image of himself as a
man who, as Harriet said, could take his medicine without making faces;
who could endure pain and punishment without howling about it. Perhaps,
in time, those letters would obliterate the memory of the vain beast
he'd been that night....

If Rodney had done an unthinkable thing; if he had kept copies of his
letters to Rose, along with her answers, in a chronological file the way
Miss Beach kept his business correspondence, he would have made the
discovery that the stiffness of them had gradually worn away and that
they were now a good deal more than mere _pro forma_ bulletins. There
had crept into them, so subtly and so gently that between one of them
and the next no striking difference was to be observed, a