Rodney's primitive masculine pride--without convicting him of
being an inadequate provider.

The baffling thing about him was that he had, quite unconsciously and
sincerely, two points of view. His affection for her, his wife, lover,
mistress, was a lens through which he sometimes looked out on the world.
As she refracted the facts of life for him they presented themselves in
the primitive old-fashioned way.

But there was another window in his soul through which he saw life with
no refractions whatever; remorselessly, logically. Looking through the
window, as he did when he talked to Barry Lake, or James Randolph, he
saw life as a mass of unyielding reciprocities. You got what you paid
for. You paid for what you got. And he saw both men and women--though
chiefly women--tangling and nullifying their lives in futile efforts to
evade this principle; looking for an Eldorado where something was to be
had for nothing; for panaceas; for the soft without the hard.

He was perfectly capable of seeing and describing an abstract wife like
that in blistering terms that would make an industrious street-walker
look almost respectable by comparison. But when he looked at Rose, he
saw her through the lens, as some one to be loved and desired,--and
prevented, if possible, from paying anything.

Somehow or other those two views must be reconciled before a life of
real comradeship between them was possible; before the really big thing
she had promised Portia to fight for could be anything more than a
tormenting dream.

Would the miracle solve this? It must. It was the only thing left to
hope for. In the shelter of the great dam she could wait serene.

And then came Harriet, and the pressure behind the dam rose higher.

Rose had tried, rather unsuccessfully, to realize, when during the
earlier days of her marriage she had heard Harriet talked about, that
there was actually in existence another woman who occupied, by blood
anyway, the same position toward Rodney and herself that Frederica did.
She felt almost like a real sister toward Frederica. But without quite
putting the notion into words, she had always felt it was just as well
that Harriet was an Italian _contessa_ four thousand miles away. Rodney
and Frederica spoke of her affectionately, to be sure, but their
references made a picture of a rather formidably correct, seriously
aristocratic sort of person. Harriet had always had, Rose could see, a
very effective voice in the f