was one of these, a tiny, slim,
black-haired little thing, who gave her name as Dolly Darling, but
hadn't memorized it yet herself, obviously a runaway in quest of
romantic adventure, whom Rose adopted as a permanent roommate.

Her doing so opened up the breach between herself and Olga Larson. It
had existed, beneath the surface, ever since the night she had gone to
supper with Galbraith. It wasn't that Olga believed Rose had taken
Galbraith as a lover. She hadn't believed that even when she hurled the
accusation against her. The wounding thing was that Rose seemed not to
care whether she believed it or not; had met her tempestuous pleas for
forgiveness and her offers of unlimited love and faith "whatever Rose
might do and however things might look," with a cold distaste that
hardly differed from the feeling she had shown in response to the
tempest of angry accusation. She told Olga, to be sure, that everything
was all right; that the thing for both of them to do, was to treat the
quarrel as if it hadn't occurred.

This wasn't what Olga wanted at all. She wanted Rose as an emotional
objective, to love passionately and be jealous of, and, for a moment now
and then, hate, as a preliminary to another passionate reconciliation.

Rose had divined that this was so. Indeed, she understood it far better
than Olga did, having had to evade one or two "crushes" of a similar
sort while she was at the university. It was a sort of thing that went
utterly against her instincts, and she was secretly glad that the
quarrel on the opening night had given her a method of resisting this
one that need not seem too utterly heartless.

Since the quarrel, Olga had been distant and dignified. She had a
grievance (that Rose, pretending to forgive her confessed mistake, had
really not done so) but she was bearing it bravely. Rose, when she could
manage the manner, was good-humored and casual, and completely blind to
the existence of the grievance Olga so nobly concealed. But Olga's
wonderful good fortune, coming quite unheralded as it did, an
advancement she had played with in her day-dreams, and never thought of
as a realizable possibility, swept her out of her pose and carried her
with a rush into Rose's arms.

This happened not a quarter of an hour after Rose had secured
Goldsmith's consent to her own transfer to the Number Two company, and
the first thing that registered on her mind was that she, who had taught
Olga to talk, saved her her