rimy window, and that which
she had been wont to contemplate through Florence McCrea's exquisitely
leaded casements, was simply planetary.

And yet, queerly enough, in terms of literal lineal measurement, the
distance between the windows themselves, was less than a thousand yards.
Less than ten minutes' walking from the mouth of the little tunnel
alongside the delicatessen shop, would take her back to her husband's
door. She had, in her flight out into the new world, doubled back on her
trail. And, such is the enormous social and spiritual distance between
North Clark Street and The Drive, she was as safely hidden here, as
completely out of the orbit of any of her friends, or even of her
friends' servants, as she could have been in New York or in San
Francisco.

Having to come away furtively like this was a terrible countermine
beneath her courage. If only she could have had a flourish of defiant
trumpets to speed her on her way! But, done like that, the thing would
have hurt Rodney too intolerably. His intelligence might be twentieth
century or beyond. It might acquiesce in, or even enthusiastically
advocate, a relation between men and women that hadn't existed, anyway
since the beginning of the Christian Era; it might accept without
faltering, all the corollaries pendent to that relation. But his
actuating instincts, his psychical reflexes, stretched their roots away
back to the Middle Ages. Under the dominance of those instincts, a man
lost caste--became an object of contemptuous derision, if he couldn't
keep his wife. It was bad enough to have another man take her away from
him, but it was worse to have her go away in the absence of such an
excuse; worst of all, to have her go away to seek a job and earn her own
living.

Rose didn't know how long the secret could be kept. Wherever she went,
whatever she did, there'd always be the risk that some one who could
carry back the news to Rodney's friends, would recognize her. It was a
risk that had to be taken, and she didn't intend to allow herself to be
paralyzed by a perpetual dread of what might at any time happen. At the
same time, she'd protect the secret as well as she could.

But there were two people it couldn't be kept from--Portia and her
mother. Rose had at first entertained the notion of keeping her mother
in the dark. It wasn't until she had spent a good many hours figuring
out expedients for keeping the deception going, that she realized it
couldn't be