Well, he had told her the truth. The edge of excitement in his voice would have carried the irresistible conviction to anybody, that the thing he had said was, without reserve, the very thing he meant. But precisely as he said it, as if, indeed, the thing that he had said were the detonating charge that fires the shell, he felt the impact, away down in the inner depths of him, of a realization that he was not the same man he had been six months ago. Not the man who had tramped impatiently back and forth across Frederica's drawing-room, expounding his ideals of space and leisure--open, wind-swept space, for the free range of a hard, clean, athletic mind. Not the man who despised the clutter of expensive junk--"so many things to have and to do, that one couldn't turn around for fear of breaking something." That man would have derided the possibility that he could ever say this thing that he, still Rodney Aldrich, had just said to Rose--and meant. To that man, the priceless hour of the day had always been precisely this one, the first waking hour, when his mind, in the enjoyment of a sort of clairvoyant limpidity, had been wont to challenge its stiffest problems, wrestle with them, and whether triumphant or not, despatch him to his office avid for the day's work and strides ahead of where he had left it the night before. He spent that hour very differently now. He spent all his hours, even the formal working ones, differently. And the terrifying thing was that he hadn't resisted the change, hadn't wanted to resist, didn't want to now, as he sat there looking down at her--at the wonderful hair which framed her face and, in its two thick braids, the incomparable whiteness of her throat and bosom--at the slumberous glory of her eyes. So, when she asked him what he was looking so solemn about, he said with more truth than he pretended to himself, that it was enough to make anybody solemn to look at her. And then, to break the spell, he asked her why she had laughed a little while back, over something she had said about Robert W. Chambers' novels. "I was thinking," she said, "of the awful disgrace I got into yesterday, with somebody--well, with Bertram Willis, by saying something like that. I'll have to tell you about it."