nd
felt him go limp under her, that she realized how genuine his fear had
been--the perfectly preposterous fear that if their new experiment
didn't come up to her anticipation she'd tell him so, and leave him
once more. This time for good.

It was a good while before they took up a rational discussion again, but
at last she said:

"It will take working out, though. We've been shirking that. Hadn't we
better begin?"

He assented. "Only, you'll have to get up," he said, "and sit down
somewhere else. Out of reach."

She smiled as she obeyed him. "It's hard for a woman to remember," she
said, "that a man can't think about other things when he's making love,
and can't think about the person he's in love with when he's doing other
things. Because, that's about the easiest thing a woman does."

She saw by the expression that went over his face that her remark had
chilled him a little. He didn't like to think of her as "a woman," nor
as of his relation to her as accounted for by the fact that he was "a
man." He'd generalize fast enough about the world at large, but it would
always be hard for him to include her and himself in his
generalizations.

"Well," he said when he'd got his pipe alight, "it's the first question
I asked you after--after I got my eyes open: What are we going to do?"

"I told Alice Perosini," she said, "the day before we left to come up
here, that I'd come back in a month, and that I'd stay until I'd
finished all the work that we were contracted for. I felt I had to do
that. It would have been so beastly unfair not to. You understand, don't
you?"

"Of course," he said. "You couldn't consider anything else. But then
what?"

"Then," she said after a silence, "then, if it's what you want me to do,
Roddy, I'll come back to Chicago--for good."

"Give up your business, you mean?" he asked quickly.

She nodded. "It can't be done out there," she said. "All the big
productions that there's any money in are made in New York. I'll come
back and just be your wife. I'll keep your house and mother the
children, and--what was it you said to Gertrude?--maintain your status,
if you don't think I'm spoiled for that."

That last phrase, though, was said with a smile, which he answered with
one of his own and threw in in parenthesis, "You ought to hear Violet go
on, and Constance." But with an instant return to seriousness, he said:

"I've not asked that, Rose. I wouldn't dream of asking it!"

"I know," she