only so much attention as was required to keep her guest from suspecting
that she wasn't really listening at all. Jane didn't stay long. She had
to go out and earn Barry's five dollars--she'd lose her job if she
didn't, so she said, and Rose was presently left alone to dream,
actually for the first time, of the wonders that were before her.

What a silly little idiot she'd been not to have seen the thing for
herself! She'd been, all the while, beating her head against blind
walls when there was a door there waiting to open of itself when the
time came. Motherhood! There'd be a doctor and a nurse at first, of
course, but presently they'd go away and she'd be left with a baby. Her
own baby! She could care for him with her own hands, feed him--her joy
reached an ecstasy at this--feed him from her own breast.

That life which Rodney led apart from her, the life into which she had
tried with such ludicrous unsuccess to effect an entrance, was nothing
to this new life which was to open before her in a few short months now.
Meanwhile, she not only must wait; she could well afford to.

That was why she could listen with that untroubled smile of hers to the
terrible things that Rodney and James Randolph and Barry Lake and Jane
got into the way of hurling across her dinner table, and to the more
mildly expressed but equally alkaline cynicisms of Jimmy Wallace.

(Jimmy was dramatic critic on one of the evening papers, as well as a
bit of a playwright. He was a slim, cool, smiling, highly sophisticated
young man, who renounced all privileges as an interpreter of life in
favor of remaining an unbiased observer of it. He never bothered to
speculate about what you ought to do;--he waited to see what you did. He
knew, more or less, everybody in the world,--in all sorts of worlds. He
was, for instance, a great friend of Violet Williamson's and Bella
Forrester's and was, at the same time, on terms of avuncular confidence
with Dotty Blott of the Globe chorus. And he was exactly the same man to
the three of them. He fitted admirably in with their new circle.)

Well, in the light of the miraculous transformation that lay before her
Rose could listen undaunted to the tough philosophizings her husband and
Barry Lake delighted in as well as to the mordant merciless realities
with which Doctor Randolph and Jimmy Wallace confirmed them. She wasn't
indifferent to it all. She listened with all her might.

If there was anything in prenatal infl