he four of them were together,
Rose felt like an outsider intruding on intimates. They didn't mean her
to feel that way--made a distinct effort, Rodney and Frederica, anyway,
to prevent her feeling that way; which of course only pointed it. They
had old memories to talk about; old friendships. They had, like all
close knit families, a sort of shorthand language to talk in. If Rose
came into the room where they were, she'd often be made aware that the
current subject of the conversation had been dropped and a new one was
getting started; or else there'd be laborious explanations.

It wouldn't have mattered--not so much anyway, if Rose had had a similar
sodality of her own to fall back on--a mass of roots extending out into
indigenous soil. But Rose, you see, had been transplanted. Her two
brothers were hardly more than faint memories of her childhood. One was
a high-school principal down in Pennsylvania; the other a professor of
history at one of the western state universities. Both of them had
married young and had been very much married--on small incomes--ever
since. The only family she had that counted, was her mother and Portia.
And they were gone now to California.

She had had a world of what she called friends, of course, of her own
age, at the high school and at the university. But her popularity in
those circles, her easy way of liking everybody, and her energetic
preoccupation with things to do, had prevented any of these friendships
from biting in very deep. None of them had been solidly founded enough
to withstand the wavelike rush of Rodney Aldrich into her life. She had
gone over altogether into her husband's world. The world that had been
her own, hadn't much more existence, except for her mother and sister
out in California, than the memory of a dream.

But it took Harriet's arrival to make her realize this. And the
realization, when it was pressed home particularly hard, brought with it
moments of downright panic. Everything--everything she had in the world,
went back to Rodney. Except for him, she was living in an absolute
vacuum. What would happen if the stoutly twisted cable that bound her to
him should be broken, as the cable that bound Harriet to her husband
was, apparently, broken? What would she have then of which she could
say, "This much is mine"? Well, she'd have the child. That would be,
partly at least, hers.

But Harriet's contribution to Rose's difficulties, to the mounting
pressure beh