A letter from him was always in the first Saturday morning delivery and she never left for her atelier till she got it. She had perceived, what he had not, the steadily growing friendliness of these letters. It wasn't a made-up thing, either. He was not telling her things because he thought she'd like to be told, but because it had insensibly become a need of his to tell her.

A year ago those letters would have made her wildly happy; would have filled her with the confidence that the end she sought was in sight at last. Now they drove her half mad with disappointment. She never opened one of those dearly familiar envelopes without the irrepressible hope that it contained a love-letter; a passionate demand that she come back to him; leave all she had and come back to him; his woman to her man.

And her disappointment and inconsistency bewildered her.

Her two chance encounters, first with Jimmy Wallace in the theater, and later with James Randolph, made her restlessness more nearly unendurable. The thought that they were going back to Chicago and would, no doubt, within a few days after their talks with her, see and talk with him, was like the cup of Tantalus. And if she could encounter them by chance, like that, why mightn't she encounter him? Why mightn't he come to New York on business? She never walked anywhere, nowadays, without watching for him.

She didn't yield, passively, to these thoughts and feelings. She fought them relentlessly, methodically. She went to a women's gymnasium every evening, threw a medicine ball around for a while, and then played a hard game of squash, in the sometimes successful attempt to get tired enough so that she'd have to sleep. Also she tried riding in the park, mornings, but that didn't work so well, and she gave it up.

There came a Saturday morning, toward the end of May, which brought no letter from Rodney, and she stayed in all day, from one delivery to the next, waiting for it. She tried to disguise her excitement over its failure to arrive, as a fear lest something might have gone wrong with him or with the twins, but did not succeed. If anything had gone wrong she knew she'd have heard. The thing that kept clutching at her heart was hope. The hope that the letter wouldn't come at all; that there'd be a telephone call instead--and Rodney's voice.

The telephone did ring just before noon, but the voice was Galbraith's.

He wanted to know if she wouldn't come over to his Long Island farm the following morning and spend the day.

She had visited the place two or three times and had always enjoyed it immensely there. It wasn't much of a farm, but there was a delightful old Revolutionary farmhouse on it, with ceilings seven feet high and casement windows, and the floors of all the rooms on different levels; and Galbraith, there, was always quite at his best. His sister and her husband, whom he had brought over from England when he bought the place, ran it for him. They were the simplest sort of peasant people who had hardly stirred from their little Surrey hamlet until that meteoric brother of theirs had summoned them on their breath-taking voyage to America, and for whom now, on this little Long Island farm, New York might have been almost as far away as London. Mrs. Flaxman did all the work of the house and farmyard without the aid of a servant, and her husband raised vegetables for the New York market.

What the pair really thought of the life John Galbraith led, or of the guests he sometimes brought out for week-end visits, no one knew. But the pleasant sort of homely hospitality one always found there was extremely attractive to Rose, and with Rodney's regular Saturday letter at hand she'd have accepted the invitation eagerly. As it was, she answered almost shortly that she couldn't come. Then, contrite, she hastened to dilute her refusal with an elaboration of regrets and hastily contrived reasons.

"All right," he said good-humoredly, "I shan't ask any one else, but if you happen to change your mind call me on the phone in the morning. Tell me what train you're coming down on and I'll meet you."

She didn't expect to change her mind, but a phonograph did it for her.

This instrument was domesticated across the court somewhere--she had never bothered to discover just which pair of windows the sound of it issued from--and it was addicted to fox-trots, comic recitations in negro dialect, and the melodies of Mr. Irving Berlin. It was jolly and companionable and Rose regarded it as a friend. But on this Saturday night, perversely enough, perhaps because its master was in Pittsburgh on a business trip and hadn't come home as expected, the thing turned sentimental. It sang _I'm on My Way to Mandalay_, under the impression that Mandalay was an island somewhere. It played _The Rosary_, done as a solo on the cornet; and over and over again it sang, with the thickest, sirupiest sentiment that John McCormack at his best is capable of,

"Just a little love, a li--ttle kiss, Just an hour that holds a world of bliss, Eyes that tremble like the stars above me, And the little word that says you love me."

It was a song that had tormented Rose before with the abysmal fatuity of its phrases, its silly sloppy melody, and yet--this was the infuriating thing--the way it had of getting into her, somehow, reaching bare nerves and setting them all aquiver.

To-night it broke her down. She closed the windows, despite the sultriness of the night, but the tune, having once got in, couldn't be shut out. Whether she heard it or only fancied she did, didn't matter.

The words bored their way into her brain.

"Just a little love, a little kiss, I would give you all my life for this, As I hold you fast and bend above you ..."

It was a white night for Rose. The morning sun had been streaming into her bedroom for an hour before she finally fell asleep. And at nine o'clock, when she wakened, she heard the phonograph going again. It was now on its way to Mandalay, but John McCormack was no doubt waiting in the background. She went to the telephone and called up Galbraith, telling him she'd come by the first train she could get.

He met her with a dog-cart and a fat pony, and when they had jogged their way to their destination they spent what was left of the morning looking over the farm. Then there was a midday farm dinner that Rose astonished herself by dealing with as it deserved and by feeling sleepy at the conclusion of. Galbraith caught her biting down a yawn and packed her off to the big Gloucester swing in the veranda, the one addition he'd built on the place, for a nap; and obediently she did as he bade her.

Coming into the veranda about four o'clock, and finding her awake, he suggested that they go for a walk. She had dressed, in anticipation of this, in a short skirt and heavy walking boots, so they set out across the fields. Two hours later, having swung her legs over a stone wall that had a comfortably inviting flat top, she remained sitting there and let her gaze rest, unfocused, on the pleasant farm land that lay below them.

After a glance at her he leaned back against the wall at her side and began filling his pipe. She dropped her hand on his nearer shoulder.

After all these months of friendship it was the first approach to a caress that had passed between them.

"You're a good friend," she said, and then the hand that had rested on him so lightly suddenly gripped hard. "And I guess I need one," she ended.

He went on filling his pipe. "Anything special you need one for?" he asked quietly.

[Illustration: "You're a good friend," she said.]

She gave a ragged little laugh. "I guess not. Just somebody strong and steady to hold on to like this."

"Well," he said very deliberately, "you want to realize this: You say I'm a friend and I am, but if there is anything in this friendship which can be of use to you you're entitled to it; to everything there is in it. Because you made it."

"One person can't make a friendship," she said. "Even two people can't.

It's got to--grow out of them somehow."

He assented with a nod. "But in this case who gave it a chance to grow?

Where would it have been if I'd had my way? If you hadn't pulled me up and set me straight?"

"For that matter," she said, "where would it have been if I had had mine? If I'd run away and tried for a fresh start, as I'd have done if you hadn't set me right?"

"Make it so," he said. "Say we've equal rights in it. Still you needn't worry about my not getting my share of the benefits."

"You _are_ content with it, aren't you? Like this? I haven't--cheated?

Used you? It's easy for a woman to do that, I think. It isn't ...?" She asked that last question by taking her hand off his shoulder.

"No, put it back," he said. "It's all right." He smoked in silence for a minute; then went on. "Why, 'content' is hardly the word for it. When I think what it was I wanted and what you've given me instead ...! It wasn't self-denial or any other high moral principle that kept me from flaring up when you took hold of me just now. It's because I've got a better thing. Something I wouldn't trade for all the love in the world.

'Content'!"

"I'd like to believe it was a better thing," she said; "but I'm afraid I can't."

"Neither could I when I was--how old are you?--twenty-four. Perhaps when you're fifty-one you can."

"I suppose so," she said absently. "Perhaps if it were a question of choosing between a love that hadn't any friendship in it and a friendship ... But it _can't_ be like that!--Can it? Can't one have both? Can't a man--love a woman and be her friend and partner all at the same time?"

"I can't answer for every man," he said reflectively. "There are all kinds of men. And that's not mentioning the queers, who aren't real men at all. Take a dozen sound, normal, healthy men and if you could find out the truth about them, which it would be pretty hard to do, you'd find immense differences in their wants, habits, feelings; in the way things _took_ them. But I've a notion that nine out of the dozen, if you could get down to the actual bedrock facts about them, would own up that if they were in love with a woman--really, you know, all the way--they wouldn't want her for a partner, and wouldn't be able to see her as a friend. That's just a guess, of course. But there's one thing I know, and that is that I couldn't."

She gave a little shiver. "_Oh_, what a mess it is!" she said. "What a perfectly hopeless blunder it is!" She slid down from the wall. "Come; let's walk."

He fell in beside her and they tramped sturdily along for a while in silence. At last she said, "Can you tell me why? Suppose there hadn't been any one else with me; suppose I'd felt toward you the way you did toward me, then; why couldn't you have gone on being my friend and partner as well as my lover? You'd have known I was worth it; have known I understood the things you were interested in and--yes, and was able to help you to work them out. Why would all that have had to go?"

"Oh, I don't know that I can explain it," he said. "But I don't think I'd call it a blunder that a strip of spring steel can't bend in your fingers like copper and still go on being a spring. You see, a man wants his work and then he wants something that isn't his work; that's altogether apart from his work; doesn't remind him of it. Love's about as far away as anything he can get. So that the notion of our working ourselves half to death over the same job, and then going home together ..."

"Yes," she admitted. "I can see that. But that doesn't cover friendship."

He owned that it didn't. "But when I'm in love with a woman--this isn't a fact I'm proud of, but it's true--I'm jealous of her. Not of other men alone, though I'm that, too, but jealous of everything. I want to be all around her. I want to be everything to her. I want her to think there's nobody like me; that nobody else could be right and I be wrong.

And I want to be able to think the same of her. I want her to hide, from me, the things about herself that I wouldn't like. When I ask her what she thinks about something, I want her to say--what I want her to think.

I know what I want her to think, and if she doesn't say it she hurts my feelings."

He thought it over a bit longer and then went on. "No, I've been in love with women I could suspect of anything. Women I thought were lying to me, cheating me; women I've hated; women I've known hated me. But I've never been in love with a woman who was my friend. I'd never figured it out before, but it's so."

In the process of figuring it out he'd more or less forgotten Rose. He had been tramping along communing with his pipe; thinking aloud. If he'd been watching her face he wouldn't have gone so far.

"Well, if it's like that," she said, and the quality of her voice drew his full attention instantly--"if love has to be like that, then the game doesn't seem worth going on with. You can't live with it, and you can't live--without it." Her voice dropped a little, but gained in intensity. "At least I can't. I don't believe I can." She stopped and faced him. "What can one _do_?" she demanded. "Wait, I suppose you'll say, till you're fifty. Well, you're fifty, and the thing can still torment you; spring on you when you aren't looking; twist you about."

She turned away with a despairing gesture and stood gazing out, tear-blinded, over the little valley the hilltop they had reached commanded.

"You want to remember this," he said at last. "I've been talking about myself. I haven't even pretended to guess for more than nine of those twelve men. That leaves three who are, I am pretty sure, different. I might have been different myself, a little anyway, if I'd got a different sort of start. If my first love-affair had been an altogether different thing. If it had been the kind that gave me a home and kids.

So you don't want to take what I've said for anything more than just the truth about me. And I'm not, thank God, a fair sample."

He stood behind her, miserably helpless to say or do anything to comfort her. An instinct told him she didn't want his hands on her just then, and he couldn't unsay the things he had told her any further than he had already.

Presently she turned back to him, slid her hand inside his arm, and started down the road with him. "My love-affair brought me a home and--kids," she said. "There are two of them--twins--a year and a half old now; and I went off and left them; left him. And all I did it for was to make myself over, into somebody he could be friends with, instead of just--as I said then--his mistress. I'd never known a woman then who was a man's mistress, really, and I didn't see why he should be so angry over my using the word. I thought it was fair enough. And the day I left his house I came to you and got a job in the chorus in _The Girl Up-stairs_. I thought that by earning my own way, building a life that he didn't--surround, as you say--I could win his friendship. And have his love besides. I don't suppose you would have believed there could be such a fool in the world as I was to do that."