And then, down below, the only note she had made during the whole of that lecture, he read: "Never marry a man with a passion for principles."

"That's the trouble with us, you see," she said. "If you were just an ordinary man without any big passions or anything, it wouldn't matter much if your life got spoiled. But with us, we've got to try for the biggest thing there is. Oh, Roddy, Roddy, darling! Hold me tight for just a minute, and then I'll come and help you pack."

BOOK THREE

The World Alone

CHAPTER I

THE LENGTH OF A THOUSAND YARDS

"Here's the first week's rent then," said Rose, handing the landlady three dollars, "and I think you'd better give me a receipt showing till when it's paid for. Do you know where there's an expressman who would go for a trunk?"

The landlady had tight gray hair, a hard bitten hatchet face, and a back that curved through a forty-degree arc between the lumbar and the cervical vertebrae, a curve which was accentuated by the faded longitudinal blue and white stripes--like ticking--of the dress she wore. She had no charms, one would have said, of person, mind or manner.

But it was nevertheless true that Rose was renting this room largely on the strength of the landlady. She was so much more humanly possible than any of the others at whose placarded doors Rose had knocked or rung ...!

For the last year and a half, anyway since she had married Rodney Aldrich, the surface that life had presented to her had been as bland as velvet. She'd never been spoken to by anybody except in terms of politeness. All the people she encountered could be included under two categories: her friends, if one stretches the word to include all her social acquaintances, and, in an equally broad sense, her servants; that is to say, people who earned their living by doing things she wanted done. Her friends' and her servants' manners were not alike, to be sure, but as far as intent went, they came to the same thing. They presented, whatever passions, misfortunes, dislikes, uncomfortable facts of any sort might lie in the background, a smooth and practically frictionless, bearing surface. A person accustomed to that surface develops a soft skin. This was about the first of Rose's discoveries.

To be looked at with undisguised suspicion--to have a door slammed in her face as the negative answer to a civil question, left her at first bewildered, and then enveloped in a blaze of indignation. It was perhaps lucky for her that this happened at the very beginning of her pilgrimage. Because, with that fire once alight within her, Rose could go through anything. The horrible fawning, leering landlady whom she had encountered later, might have turned her sick, but for that fine steady glow. The hatchet-faced one she had finally arrived at, made no protestations of her own respectability, and she seemed, though rather reluctantly, willing to assume that of her prospective lodger. She was puzzled about something, Rose could see; disposed to be very watchful and at no pains to conceal this attitude.

Well, she'd probably learned that she had to watch, poor thing! And, for that matter, Rose would probably have to do some watching on her own account. And, if the fact was there, why bother to keep up a contradictory fiction. So Rose asked for a receipt.

The matter of the trunk was easily disposed of. Rose had a check for it.

It was at the Polk Street Station. There was a cigar and news stand two blocks down, the landlady said, where an expressman had his headquarters. There was a blue sign out in front: "Schulz Express"; Rose couldn't miss it.

The landlady went away to write out a receipt. Rose closed the door after her and locked it.

It was a purely symbolistic act. She wasn't going to change her clothes or anything, and she didn't particularly want to keep anybody out. But, in a sense in which it had never quite been true before, this was her room, a room where any one lacking her specific invitation to enter, would be an intruder--a condition that had not obtained either in her mother's house or in Rodney's.

She smiled widely over the absurdity of indulging in a pleasurable feeling of possession in a squalid little cubby-hole like this. The wall-paper was stained and faded, the paint on the soft-wood floor worn through in streaks; there was an iron bed--a double bed, painted light blue and lashed with string where one of its joints showed a disposition to pull out. The mattress on the bed was lumpy. There was a dingy-looking oak bureau with a rather small but pretty good plate-glass mirror on it; a marble topped, black walnut wash-stand; a pitcher of the plainest and cheapest white ware standing in a bowl on top of it, and a highly ornate, hand-painted slop-jar--the sole survivor, evidently, of a much prized set--under the lee of it. The steep gable of the roof cut away most of one side of the room, though there would be space for Rose's trunk to stand under it, and across the corner, at a curiously distressing angle, hung an inadequate curtain that had five or six clothes hooks behind it.

In the foreground of the view out of the window, was a large oblong plateau--the flat roof of an extension which had casually been attached to the front of the building and carried it forward to the sidewalk over what had once been a small front yard. The extension had a plate-glass front and was occupied, Rose had noticed before she plunged into the little tunnel that ran alongside it and led to the main building, by a dealer in delicatessen. Over the edge of the flat roof, she could see the top third of two endless streams of trolley-cars, for the traffic in this street was heavy, by night, she imagined, as well as by day.

The opposite facade of the street, like the one of which her own wall and window formed a part, was highly irregular and utterly casual. There were cheap two-story brick stores with false fronts that carried them up a half story higher. There were little gable-ended cottages with their fronts hacked out into show-windows. There were double houses of brick with stone trimmings that once had had some residential pretensions. The one characteristic that they possessed in common, was that of having been designed, patently, for some purpose totally different from the one they now served.

The shops on the street level had, for the most part, an air of shabby prosperity. There was, within the space Rose's window commanded, a cheap little tailor shop, the important part of whose business was advertised by the sign "pressing done." There was a tobacconist's shop whose unwashed windows revealed an array of large wooden buckets and dusty lithographs; a shoe shop that did repairing neatly while you waited; a rather fly-specked looking bakery. There was a saloon on the corner, and beside it, a four-foot doorway with a painted transom over it that announced it as the entrance of the Bellevue Hotel.

The signs on the second-story windows indicated dentist parlors, the homes of mid-wives, ladies' tailors and dressmakers, and everywhere furnished rooms for light housekeeping to let.

The people who patronized those shops, who drank their beer at the corner saloon, who'd be coming hurriedly in the night to ring up the mid-wife, who smoked the sort of tobacco that was sold from those big wooden buckets; the people who lounged along the wide sidewalks, or came riding down-town at seven in the morning, and back at six at night, packed so tight that they couldn't get their arms up to hold by the straps in the big roaring cars that kept that incessant procession going in the middle of the street--they all inhabited, Rose realized, a world utterly different from the one she had left. The distance between the hurrying life she looked out on through her grimy 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 done. She had been writing her mother a letter a week ever since the departure to California--letters naturally full of domestic details that simply couldn't be kept up. The only possible deception would be a compromise with the truth and compromises of that sort are apt to be pretty unsatisfactory. They suggest concealments in every phase, and to an imaginative mind, are more terrifying, nine times in ten, than the truth you're trying to soften. Then, too, the story given out to Rodney's friends being that Rose was in California with her mother and Portia, left the chance always open for some contretemps which would lead to her mother's discovering the truth in a surprising and shocking way.

But the truth itself, confidently stated, not as a tragic ending, but as the splendid hopeful beginning of a life of truer happiness for Rose and her husband, needn't be a shock. So this was what Rose had borne down on in her letter to Portia. It wasn't a very long letter, considering how much it had to tell.

"... I have found the big thing couldn't be had without a fight,"

she wrote. "You shouldn't be surprised, because you've probably found out for yourself that nothing worth having comes very easily.

But you're not to worry about me, nor be afraid for me, because I'm going to win. I'm making the fight, somehow, for you as well as for myself. I want you to know that. I think that realizing I was living your life as well as mine, is what has given me the courage to start....

"I've got some plans, but I'm not going to tell you what they are.

But I'll write to you every week and tell you what I've done and I want you to write to Rodney. I want to be sure that you understand this: Rodney isn't to blame for what's happened. I don't feel that I am, either, exactly. We're just in a situation that there's only one real way out of. I don't know whether he sees that yet or not.

He's too terribly hurt and bewildered. But we haven't quarreled, and I believe we're further in love with each other than we've ever been before. I know I am with him....

"Break this thing to mother as gently as you like, but tell her everything before you stop...."

This letter written and despatched, she had worked out the details of her departure with a good deal of care. In her own house, before her servants, she had tried to act--and she felt satisfied that her attempt was successful--just as she would have done had her pretended telegram really come from Portia. She had packed, looked up trains, made a reservation. She had called up Frederica and told her the news. The train she had selected left at an hour and on a day when she knew Frederica wouldn't be able to come and see her off. Frederica had come down to the house of course to say good-by to her, and carrying her pretense through that scene, that had for her so much deeper and more poignant a regret than she dared show--because she really loved Frederica--was, next to bidding the twins good-by, the hardest thing she had to go through with. Lying and pretending were always terribly hard for Rose, and a lie to any one she was fond of, almost impossible. The only thing that enabled her to see it through, was the consideration that she was doing it for Rodney. He'd probably tell Frederica what had happened in time, but Rose was determined that he should have the privilege of choosing his own time for doing it.

Her bag was packed, her trunk was gone, her motor waiting at the door to take her to the station, when the maid Doris brought the twins home from their airing. This wasn't chance, but prearrangement.

"Give them to me;" Rose said, "and then you may go up and tell Mrs.

Ruston she may have them in a few minutes."

She took them into her bedroom and laid them side by side on her bed.

They had thriven finely--justified, as far as that went, Harriet's decision in favor of bottle feeding. Had she died back there in that bed of pain, never come out of the ether at all, they'd still be just like this--plump, placid, methodical. Rose had thought of that a hundred times, but it wasn't what she was thinking of now.

The thing that caught her as she stood looking down on them, was the wave of sudden pity. She saw them suddenly as persons with the long road all ahead of them, as a boy and a girl, a youth and a maid, a man and a woman. They were destined to have their hopes and loves, fears, triumphs, tragedies perhaps. The boy there, Rodney, might have to face, some day, the situation his father confronted now; might have to come back into an empty home, and turn a stiff inexpressive face on a coolly curious world. Little Portia there might find herself, some day, gazing with wide seared eyes, at a life some unexpected turn of the wheel of Fate had thrust her, all unprepared, into the midst of. Or it might be her fate to love without attracting love--to drain all the blood out of her life in necessary sacrifices; to wither that some one else might have a chance to grow. Those possibilities were all there before these two solemn, staring, little helpless things on the bed. What toys of Chance they were!

She'd never thought of them like that before. The baby she had looked forward to--the baby she hadn't had--had never been thought of that way either. It was to be something to provide her, Rose, with an occupation; to enable her to interpret her life in new terms; to make an alchemic change in the very substance of it. The transmutation hadn't taken place. She surmised now, dimly, that she hadn't deserved it should.

"You've never had a mother at all, you poor little mites," she said.

"But you're going to have one some day. You're going to be able to come to her with your troubles, because she'll have had troubles herself.

She'll help you bear your hurts, because she's had hurts of her own. And she'll be able to teach you to stand the gaff, because she's stood it herself."

For the first time since they were born, she was thinking of their need of her rather than of her need of them and with that thought, came for the first time, the surge of passionate maternal love that she had waited for, so long in vain. There was, suddenly, an intolerable ache in her heart that could only have been satisfied by crushing them up against her breast; kissing their hands--their feet.

Rose stood there quivering, giddy with the force of it. "Oh, you darlings!" she said. "But wait--wait until I deserve it!" And without touching them at all, she went to the door and opened it. Mrs. Ruston and Doris were both waiting in the hall.

"I must go now," she said. "Good-by. Keep them carefully for me." Her voice was steady, and though her eyes were bright, there was no trace of tears upon her cheeks. But there was a kind of glory shining in her face that was too much for Doris, who turned away and sobbed loudly. Even Mrs. Ruston's eyes were wet.

"Good-by," said Rose again, and went down composedly enough to her car.

She rode down to the station, shook hands with and said good-by to Otto, the chauffeur, allowed the porter to carry her bag into the waiting-room. There she tipped the porter, picked up the bag herself, and walked out the other door; crossed over to Clark Street and took a street-car. At Chicago Avenue she got off and walked north, keeping her eye open for placards advertising rooms to let. It was at the end of about a half mile that she found the hatchet-faced landlady, paid her three dollars, and locked her door, as a symbol, perhaps, of the bigger heavier door that she had swung to and locked on the whole of her past life.

Amid all the welter of emotions boiling up within her, grief was not present. There was a very deep-reaching excitement that sharpened all her faculties; that even made her see colors more brightly and hear fainter sounds. There was an intent eagerness to get the new life fairly begun. But, strangest of all, and yet so vivid that even its strangeness couldn't prevent her being aware of it, was a perfectly enormous relief.

The thing which, when she had first faced it as the only thoroughfare to the real life she so passionately wanted, had seemed such a veritable nightmare, was an accomplished fact. The week of acute agony she had lived through while she was forcing her sudden resolution on Rodney had been all but unendurable with the enforced contemplation of the moment of parting which it brought so relentlessly nearer. There had been a terror, too, lest when the moment actually came, she couldn't do it.