u must be! How do you think it went?
Do you think you impressed them? I bet you did."

And not having been rubbed the wrong way by a foolish question, he held
her off with both hands for a moment, then hugged her up and told her
she was a trump.

"I had a sort of uneasy feeling," he confessed, "that after last
night--the way I threw you out of my office, fairly, I'd find
you--tragic. I might have known I could count on you. Lord, but it's
good to have you like this! Is there anywhere we have got to go? Or can
we just stay home?"

He didn't want to flounder through an emotional morass, you see. A firm
smooth-bearing surface, that was what, for every-day use, he wanted her
to provide him with; lightly given, casual caresses that could be
accepted with a smile, pleasantness, a confident security that she
wouldn't be "tragic." And on the assumption that she couldn't walk
beside him on the main path of his life, it was just and sensible. But
it wasn't good enough for Rose.

So the very next morning, she stripped the cover off the first of the
books the half-back had picked out for her, and really went to work. She
bit down, angrily, the yawns that blinded her eyes with tears; she made
desperate efforts to flog her mind into grappling with the endless
succession of meaningless pages spread out before her, to find a germ of
meaning somewhere in it that would bring the dead verbiage to life. She
tried to recall the thrill in Rodney's voice when he had told her, on
that wonderful wind-swept afternoon, that the law was the finest
profession in the world. Also, he had told her, he'd never been bored
with it--it was immoral to be bored. It was a confession of defeat,
anyway, she could see that. And she wouldn't--she absolutely would not
be defeated.

In a variety of moods which included everything except real hope and
confidence, she kept the thing up for weeks--didn't give up indeed,
until Fate stepped in, in her ironic way, and took the decision out of
her hands. She was very secretive about it; developed an almost morbid
fear that Rodney would discover what she was doing and laugh his big
laugh at her. She resisted innumerable questions she wanted to propound
to him, from a fear that they'd betray her secret.

She even forbore to ask him about the case--it was The Case in her
mind--the one she knew about, and as she struggled along with her heavy
text-books, and a realization grew in her mind of the countless hours of
su