een,
if she were accustomed to driving to balls in coaches and having princes
ask her to dance with them, could possibly have looked at that prince
the way Cinderella must have looked at him.

While a sophisticated woman can affect this sort of simplicity well
enough to take in the men, the affectation is always transparently clear
to other women and they detest her for it. But it was altogether the
real thing with Rose, and they knew it and took to her as naturally as
the men did.

So it fell out that what with the Junior League, the woman's auxiliary
boards of one or two of the more respectably elect charities, the
Thursday Club and The Whifflers (this was the smallest and smartest
organization of the lot--fifteen or twenty young women supposed to
combine and reconcile social and intellectual brilliancy on even terms.
They met at one another's houses and read scintillating papers about
nothing whatever under titles selected generally from _Through the
Looking-glass_ or _The Hunting of the Snark_)--what with all this, her
days were quite as full as the evenings were, when she and Rodney dined
and went to the opera and paid fabulous prices to queer professionals,
to keep themselves abreast of the minute in all the new dances.

But it wasn't merely the events of this sort, sitting in boxes at the
opera and going to marvelous supper dances afterward, that had this
thrilling quality of incredibility to Rose. The connective tissue of her
life gave her the same sensation, perhaps even more strongly.

Portia had been quite right in saying that she had never _had_ to do
anything; the rallying of all her forces under the spur of necessity was
an experience she had never undergone. And it was also true that her
mother, and for that matter, Portia herself had spoiled her a lot--had
run about doing little things for her, come in and shut down her windows
in the morning, and opened the register, and on any sort of excuse, on a
Saturday morning, for example, had brought her her breakfast on a tray.

But these things had been favors, not services--never to be asked for,
of course, and always to be accepted a little apologetically. She never
knew what it was really to be served, until she and Rodney came back
from their camp in the woods. The whole mechanism of ringing bells for
people, telling them, quite courteously of course, but with no spare
words, precisely what she wanted them to do and seeing them, with no
words at all of