“Unfortunately!” thought Frederica.  This was rather illuminating.  The Randolphs’ love-match had been regarded as establishing a sort of standard of excellence.  But when you heard a woman trying to arrange subsidiary romances for her husband, or lamenting the failure of them, it meant, as a rule, that things were wearing rather thin.  However, she dismissed this speculation for a later time, and went back to Rose.

“I had been worrying about her, too;” she said.  “Rodney was so funny about her. He was worried, I could see that.  And he means the best in the world, the dear.  But he could be a dreadful brute, just in his simplicity.  Oh, I know!  He and I were always rather special pals—­more than Harriet.  But no man ever learned less from his sisters,—­about women, I mean.  He’s always been so big and healthy and even-minded, you couldn’t tell him anything, except what you could print right out in black and white.  So when you were feeling edgy and blue and miserable you either kept out of his way or kept your troubles to yourself.  He was always easy to fool—­there was that about it.  If you wiped your eyes and blew your nose, he always thought you had a cold.  Which is all very nice about a brother; but in a husband ...”

Something that Eleanor did with her shoulders, the way she blew out her smoke and twisted her mouth around, caught Frederica’s eye.  “What did you mean by that?” she asked.  “Oh, I know you didn’t say anything.”

Eleanor got up restlessly, squared the cushions on her chaise longue, tapped her cigarette ash into a receiver and said that Rose was happy enough now, anyway, if looks were anything to go by; hesitated again, and finally answered Frederica’s question.

“Why,” she said, “whenever I hear a woman miaouling about being misunderstood, I always want to tell her she doesn’t know her luck.  Wait till she marries a man who really does understand—­too well.  Let her see how she likes it, whenever she turns loose and gets—­going a little, to have him look interested, as if he were taking notes, and begin asking questions that are—­a little too intelligent.  How does she think it’ll feel never to know, never—­I mean that, that she isn’t being—­experimented on!”

It was a rather horrible idea, Frederica didn’t try to deny it.  But not being understood wasn’t very agreeable either.  What did they want then?

Eleanor laughed.  “Did you ever think,” she asked, “that one of these regular stage husbands would be rather satisfactory?  Terribly particular, you know, and bossy and domineering.  The kind that discovers a letter or a handkerchief or sees you going into some other man’s ‘rooms’ and gets frightfully jealous, and denounces you without giving you a chance to explain, and drags you round by the hair and threatens to kill you?  And then discovers—­in the last act, you know,—­that you were perfectly innocent all the while, and repents all over the place and begs you to forgive him and take him back; and you do?  Do you suppose any of the men we know would be capable of acting like that?  Don’t you think we’d like it if they were?  Not if they really did those things, perhaps, but if we thought they might?”