"But you take Jim. I can get my way with him always. I can outmaneuver him every time. He's positively simple about things, unless they happen to strike him—professionally. But there's always something that gets away. Something I'm no nearer now than I was the day I first saw him. And I sometimes think that if there were—something horrible I had to forgive him for—if I could get something on him as they say.... It's rather fun, isn't it, sometimes, just to let your mind go wild and see where you bring up. Awful rot, of course. Can you stop for lunch?"
Frederica thought she couldn't; must run straight along. But the talk had been amusing. "Only—you won't mind?—don't spring any of that stuff on Rose. She's just a child, really you know, and entitled to any illusions that Rodney leaves; especially these days."
"You, as an old hen fussing about your new chicken!" Eleanor mocked. "Wait till you can look the part a little better, Frederica, dear. But really, I'm harmless. Talk to Jim and Rodney and those fearful and wonderful Lakes of his. They were there, and—well, you ought to have heard the talk. I thought I was pretty well hardened, but once or twice I gasped. Jim's pretty weird when he gets going, but that Barry Lake has a sort of—surgical way of discussing just anything, and his wife's as bad. Oh, she's awfully interesting, I'll admit that, and she's as crazy about Rose as any of the rest of us, which is to her credit.
"We never got off women all the evening. Barry Lake had their history down from the early Egyptians, and Jim had an endless string of pathological freaks to tell about. And then Rodney came out strong for economic independence, only with his own queer angle on it of course. He thought it would be a fine thing, but it wouldn't happen until the men insisted on it. When a girl wasn't regarded as marriageable unless she had been trained to a trade or a profession, then things would begin to happen. I think he meant it, too, though he was more than usually outrageous in his way of putting things.
"Well, and all the while there sat Rose, taking it all in with those big eyes of hers, smiling to herself now and then; saying things, too, sometimes, that were pretty good, though nobody but Jim seemed to understand, always, just what she meant. They've talked before, those two. But she didn't mind—anything; no more embarrassed than as if we'd been talking embroidery stitches. You don't need to worry about her. And she absolutely seemed to like Jane Lake."
Frederica did worry. Seriously meditated running in on Rodney before she went home to lunch and giving him a tip that a young wife in Rose's condition wanted treating a little more carefully. It was not for prudential reasons that she decided against doing it. She was perfectly willing to have her head bitten off in a good cause. But she knew Rodney down to the ground; knew that it was utterly impossible for him, whatever his previous resolutions might be, to pull up on the brink of anything. Once you launched a topic that interested him, he'd go through with it. So the only thing that would do any good would be to ban the Lakes and James Randolph completely. And Rodney, if persuaded to do that—he would in a minute, of course, if he thought it would be good for Rose—would be incapable of concealing from her why he had done it; which would leave matters worse than ever.
The only outcome, then, of her visit to Eleanor and her subsequent cogitations, was that Martin, when he came home that night, found her unusually affectionate and inclined to be misty about the eyes. "I'm a—lucky guy, all right"—this was her explanation,—"being married to you. Instead of any of the others."
He was a satisfactory old dear. He took her surplus tenderness as so much to the good, and didn't bother over not knowing what it was all about.
Eleanor was right in her surmise that Rose had really taken a fancy to Jane Lake. She was truly—and really humbly—grateful to Jane, in the first place, for liking her, finding her, in Jane's own phrase, "worth while," and her ideas worth listening to. Because here was something, you see, that she could take at its face value. There was no long-circuited sex attraction to discount everything, in Jane's case. But she had another reason.
Rodney, it seemed, had told the Lakes about the prospective baby the very morning after he'd learned the news himself, and Jane—this was perfectly characteristic of her—had come straight up to see Rose about it; even before Frederica. And about the first thing she said was: