She pulled in a long sigh of anticipatory relief.
"Well, then," she demanded, "what did she say? How did she explain how she could have done such a thing as that?"
"I didn't ask her to explain," said Rodney. "I asked her to come home, and she wouldn't."
"Oh, it's wicked!" she cried. "It's the most abominably selfish thing I ever heard of!"
He made a gesture of protest, but it didn't stop her.
"Oh, I suppose," she flashed, "she didn't mean any harm—wasn't just trying to do the cruelest thing she could to you. But it would be a little less infuriating if she had."
"Pull up, Freddy!" he said. Rather gently though, for him. "There's no good going on like that. And besides ... You were saying Harriet would do anything in the world for me. Well, there's something you can do. You're the only person I know who can."
Her answer was to come around behind his chair, put her cheek down beside his, and reach for his hands.
"Let's get away from this miserable breakfast table," she said. "Come up to where I live, where we can be safely by ourselves; then tell me about it."
In front of her boudoir fire, looking down on her as she sat in her flowered wing chair, an enormously distended rug-covered pillow beside her knees waiting for him to drop down on when he felt like it, he began rather cautiously to tell her what he wanted.