His answer was that perhaps he couldn't imagine it, but that he knew it, just the same. "Even an ordinary marriage isn't any too easy; a marriage, I mean, where it's quite well understood which of the parties to it shall always submit to the other; and which of them is the important one who's always to have the right of way. There's generally something perfectly unescapable that decides that question. But with us there isn't. So the question who's got to give in will have to be decided on its merits every time a difference arises."
She burlesqued a look of extreme apprehension. She was deeply and utterly content with life just then. But he wouldn't be diverted.
"There's another reason," he went on. "I've a notion that the thing we're after is about the finest thing there is. If that's so, we'll have to pay for it, in one way or another. But we aren't going to worry about it. We'll just go ahead—and see what happens."
"Do you remember when you said that before?" asked Rose. "You told me that marriage was an adventure anyway, and that the only thing to do was to try it—and see what happened."
He grunted. "The real adventure's just begun," he said.
"Anyhow," she murmured drowsily, "you can talk to me again. Just as if we weren't married."
And there is just about where they stand to-day—at the beginning, or hardly past the beginning, of what he spoke of as their real adventure; they are going forward prepared to make the best of it and see what happens.
What did happen within two or three days after this last conversation of theirs that I have chronicled was that Rose went back with Rodney and the twins to Chicago, stayed there only until Miss French could be summoned back from her vacation, and then went on to New York to a badly worried Alice and the now extremely urgent affairs of Dane & Company.
Summer is a slack time for a lawyer, of course, since judges are gentlemen who like long vacations. So Rodney persuaded Rose to take a bigger apartment in the same building and to put a card in the mail-box that would account for him as well as for herself. He came down pretty often, and always had, it must be owned, a rather hard time of it. The spectacle of Rose driving along an ungodly number of hours a day while he idled about doing nothing was one he found it hard to get used to. It didn't altogether reconcile him to it to have her point out that there were times when he drove like that. They had two or three good Sundays, though; one of them out on Long Island with John Galbraith—a meeting and the beginning of a friendship that Rose had been very keen to bring about.