"I don't suppose you--beat her, did you?" It was too infuriating, having him meek like this! His reply was barely audible. "I might better have done it." Frederica sprang to her feet. "Well, then, I'll tell you!" she said. "I won't go to her. I'll go if you'll give me a free hand. If you'll let me tell her what I think of what she's done and the way she's done it--not letting you know--not giving you a chance. But go and beg her to forgive _you_, I won't. "All right," he said dully. "You're within your rights, of course." The miserable scene dragged on a little longer. Frederica cried and pleaded and stormed, without moving him at all. He seemed distressed at her grief, urged her to treat his request as if he hadn't made it; but he explained nothing, answered none of her questions. It was an enormous relief to her, and, she fancied, to him, for that matter, when, after a premonitory knock at the door, Harriet walked in on them. The situation didn't need much explaining, but Frederica summed it up while the others exchanged their coolly friendly greetings, with the statement: "Rod's been trying to get me to go to Rose and say that it was all his fault, and I won't." "Why not?" said Harriet. "What earthly thing does it matter whose fault it is? He can have it his fault if he likes." "You know it isn't," Frederica muttered rebelliously. Harriet seated herself delicately and deliberately in one of the curving ends of a little Victorian sofa, and stretched her slim legs out in front of her. "Certainly I don't care whose fault it is," she said. "You never get anywhere by trying to decide a question like that. What I'm interested in is what can be done about it. It's not a very nice situation. Nobody likes it--at least I should _think_ Rose would be pretty sick of it by now. She may have been crazy for a stage career, but she's probably seen that the chorus of a third-rate musical comedy won't take her anywhere. "The thing's simply a mess, and the only thing to do, is to clear it up as quickly and as decently as we can--and it can be cleared up, if we go at it right. Only, for the love of Heaven, Freddy, before you let Rod go out of the house, give him a dose of veronal and pack him off to a quiet room up-stairs to sleep around the clock! The way he looks now, he's a proclamation of calamity across the street!" She wasn't at all disturbed by the outburst this provoked from Rodney. Indeed, Frederica, from a glimpse she got of her face as she sat listening to his blistering denunciation of this apparently whole-hearted concern for appearances, and his passionate denial that they meant anything at all to him, suspected that her sister's words had been calculated to produce just this result. When it had subsided, Harriet's first words proved it. [Illustration: "What earthly thing does it matter whose fault it is?"]