The Real Adventure
the way Cinderella must have looked at him.
While a sophisticated woman can affect this sort of simplicity well
enough to take in the men, the affectation is always transparently clear
to other women and they detest her for it. But it was altogether the
real thing with Rose, and they knew it and took to her as naturally as
the men did.
So it fell out that what with the Junior League, the woman's auxiliary
boards of one or two of the more respectably elect charities, the
Thursday Club and The Whifflers (this was the smallest and smartest
organization of the lot--fifteen or twenty young women supposed to
combine and reconcile social and intellectual brilliancy on even terms.
They met at one another's houses and read scintillating papers about
nothing whatever under titles selected generally from _Through the
Looking-glass_ or _The Hunting of the Snark_)--what with all this, her
days were quite as full as the evenings were, when she and Rodney dined
and went to the opera and paid fabulous prices to queer professionals,
to keep themselves abreast of the minute in all the new dances.
But it wasn't merely the events of this sort, sitting in boxes at the
opera and going to marvelous supper dances afterward, that had this
thrilling quality of incredibility to Rose. The connective tissue of her
life gave her the same sensation, perhaps even more strongly.
Portia had been quite right in saying that she had never _had_ to do
anything; the rallying of all her forces under the spur of necessity was
an experience she had never undergone. And it was also true that her
mother, and for that matter, Portia herself had spoiled her a lot--had
run about doing little things for her, come in and shut down her windows
in the morning, and opened the register, and on any sort of excuse, on a
Saturday morning, for example, had brought her her breakfast on a tray.
But these things had been favors, not services--never to be asked for,
of course, and always to be accepted a little apologetically. She never
knew what it was really to be served, until she and Rodney came back
from their camp in the woods. The whole mechanism of ringing bells for
people, telling them, quite courteously of course, but with no spare
words, precisely what she wanted them to do and seeing them, with no
words at all of their own, except the barest minimum required to
indicate respectful acquiescence--carrying out these instructions, was
in its novelty, as sensuously delightful a thing to her feelings as the
contact with a fine fabric was to her finger-tips.
"I haven't," Rose, in bed, told Rodney one morning, "a single, blessed,
mortal thing to do all day." Some fixture scheduled for that morning had
been moved, she went on to explain, and Eleanor Randolph was feeling
seedy and had called off a little luncheon and matinee party. So, she
concluded with a deep-drawn sigh, the day was empty.
"Oh, that's too bad," he said with concern. "Can't you manage
something ...?"
"Too bad!" said Rose in lively dissent. "It's too heavenly! I've got a
whole day just to enjoy being myself;--being"--she reached across to the
other bed for his hand, and getting it, stroked her cheek with
it--"being my new self. You've no idea how new it is, or how exciting
all the little things about it are. State Street's so different
now--going and getting the exact thing I want, instead of finding
something I can make do, and then faking it up to look as much like the
real thing as I could. Portia used to think I faked pretty well. It was
the one thing she really admired about me, because she couldn't do it
herself at all. But I never was--don't you know?--right.
"And then when I was going anywhere, I'd figure out the through routes
and where I'd take transfers, and how many blocks I'd have to walk, and
what kind of shoes I'd have to wear. And coming home in time for dinner
always meant the rush hour, and I'd have to stand. And it simply never
occurred to me that everybody else didn't do it that way. Except"--she
smiled--"except in Robert Chambers' novels and such."
It wasn't necessary to see Rose smile to know she did it. Her voice,
broadening out and--dimpling, betrayed the fact. This smile, plainly
enough, went rather below the surface, carried a reference to something.
But Rodney didn't interrupt. He let her go on and waited to inquire
about it later.
"So you see," she concluded, "it's quite an adventure just to say--well,
that I want the car at a quarter to eleven and to tell Otto exactly
where I want him to drive me to. I always feel as if I ought to say that
if he'll just stop the car at the corner of Diversey Street, I can
walk."
He laughed out at that and asked her how long she thought this blissful
state of things would last.
"Forever," she said.
But presently she propped herself up on one elbow and looked over at him
rather thoughtfully. "Of course it's none of it new to you," she
said--"not the silly little things I've been talking about, nor the
things we do together--oh, the dinners, and the dances, and the operas.
Do you sort of--wish I'd get tired of it? Is it a dreadful bore to you?"
"So long as it doesn't bore you," he said; "so long as you go
on--shining the way you do over it, and I am where I can see you
shine"--he got out of his bed, sat down on the edge of hers, and took
both her hands--"so long as it's like that, you wonder," he said, "well,
the dinners and the operas and all that may be piffle, but I shall be
blind to the fact."
She kissed his hands and told him contentedly that he was a darling.
But, after a moment's silence, a little frown puckered her eyebrows and
she asked him what he was so solemn about.
Well, he had told her the truth. The edge of excitement in his voice
would have carried the irresistible conviction to anybody, that the
thing he had said was, without reserve, the very thing he meant. But
precisely as he said it, as if, indeed, the thing that he had said were
the detonating charge that fires the shell, he felt the impact, away
down in the inner depths of him, of a realization that he was not the
same man he had been six months ago. Not the man who had tramped
impatiently back and forth across Frederica's drawing-room, expounding
his ideals of space and leisure--open, wind-swept space, for the free
range of a hard, clean, athletic mind. Not the man who despised the
clutter of expensive junk--"so many things to have and to do, that one
couldn't turn around for fear of breaking something." That man would
have derided the possibility that he could ever say this thing that he,
still Rodney Aldrich, had just said to Rose--and meant.
To that man, the priceless hour of the day had always been precisely
this one, the first waking hour, when his mind, in the enjoyment of a
sort of clairvoyant limpidity, had been wont to challenge its stiffest
problems, wrestle with them, and whether triumphant or not, despatch him
to his office avid for the day's work and strides ahead of where he had
left it the night before.
He spent that hour very differently now. He spent all his hours, even
the formal working ones, differently. And the terrifying thing was that
he hadn't resisted the change, hadn't wanted to resist, didn't want to
now, as he sat there looking down at her--at the wonderful hair which
framed her face and, in its two thick braids, the incomparable whiteness
of her throat and bosom--at the slumberous glory of her eyes.
So, when she asked him what he was looking so solemn about, he said with
more truth than he pretended to himself, that it was enough to make
anybody solemn to look at her. And then, to break the spell, he asked
her why she had laughed a little while back, over something she had said
about Robert W. Chambers' novels.
"I was thinking," she said, "of the awful disgrace I got into yesterday,
with somebody--well, with Bertram Willis, by saying something like that.
I'll have to tell you about it."
Bertram Willis, it should be said, was the young architect with the
upturned mustaches and the soft Byronic collars, who had done the house
for the McCreas. And I must warn you to take the adjective young, with a
grain of salt. Youth was no mere accident with him. He made an art of
it, just as he did of eating and drinking and love-making and,
incidentally, architecture. He was enormously in demand, chiefly
perhaps, among young married women whose respectability and social
position were alike beyond cavil. He never carried anything too far, you
see. He was no pirate--a sort, rather, of licensed privateer. And what
made him so invincibly attractive--after you had granted his other
qualities, that is--was that he professed himself, among women,
exceedingly difficult to please, so that attentions from him, even of a
casual sort, became _ex hypothesi_ compliments of the first order. If he
asked you, in his innocently shameless way, to belong to his _hareem_,
you boasted of it afterward;--jocularly, to be sure, but you felt
pleased just the same. The thing that had given the final cachet of
distinction to Rose's social success that season, had been the fact that
he had shown a disposition to flirt with her quite furiously.
Rose didn't need to tell her husband that, of course, because he knew it
already, as he also knew that Willis had asked her to be one of the
Watteau group he was getting up for the charity ball (the ball was to
be a sumptuously picturesque affair that year), nor that he had been
spending hours with her over the question of costumes--getting as good
as he gave, too, because her eye for clothes amounted to a really
special talent.
All that Rodney didn't know, was about the conversation the two of them
had had yesterday afternoon at tea-time.
Rose, intent on telling him all about it, had postponed the recital
while she made up her own mind as to how she should regard the thing
herself; whether she ought to have been annoyed, or seriously
remonstrant, or whether the smile of pure amusement which had come so
spontaneously to her lips, had expressed, after all, an adequate
emotion.
The look in her husband's face made an end of all doubts, reduced the
episode of yesterday to its proper scale. Married to a man who could
look at her like that, she needn't take any one else's looks or speeches
very seriously. It was at this angle that she told about it.
"Why," she said, "of course he's always talked to me as if I were about
six--sixteen, anyway, no older than that, and the names he makes up to
call me are simply too silly to repeat. But I never paid any attention,
because--well, everybody knows he's that way to everybody. 'Flower face'
was one of his favorites, but there were others that were worse. Well,
yesterday he brought around some old costume plates, but he wouldn't let
me look at them without coming round beside me and--holding my hand, so
that didn't work very well. And then he got quite solemn and said
I'd--given him the only real regret of his life, because he hadn't seen
me until it was too late."
"I didn't know," said Rodney, "that he ever let obstacles like husbands
bother him."
"That's what I thought he meant at first," said Rose, "but it wasn't. He
didn't mean it was too late because of my being married to you. He meant
too late because of him. He couldn't love me, he said, as I deserved,
because he'd been in love so many times before, himself.
"And then, of course, just when I should have been looking awfully sad
and sympathetic, I had to go and grin, and he wanted to know why, and I
said, 'Nothing,' but he insisted, you know, so then I told him.
"Well, it was just what I said to you a while ago--that I didn't know
any men ever talked like that except in books by Hichens or
Chambers--why do you suppose they're both named Robert?--and he went