She abated, in these thoughts, nothing of the eagerness with which she was living this great day--the day whose points of suspension (on which it tumultuously revolved) were the taking over of the significant apartment from which she had just come and the entering upon the significant invitation to which now her feet were taking her. These thoughts, this analysis of her attitude to sentimental appeals, she tossed upon her eager happiness that was her being as an airball tossed upon laughing breath that yet is used, breathing, to support life. And she was aware that this was so. And she enjoyed a flash of approval of herself that it could be so; it was admirable, it was sensible, thus to be able to detach and look upon a portion of her mind while her main mind deflected not a shade from its occupation with the main chance. That faculty was perhaps the secret of her success, the quality, that, in exercise, had brought her to the significant apartment and to the significant invitation. She was at the gate of Mr. Sturgiss’s house and she most happily passed up the short drive, ascended the steps and rang the bell. Mr. Sturgiss’s house was almost on the summit of Shoot Up Hill. It was one of those houses standing a few miles along the main thoroughfares out of London that, now in decay or displaced by busy shops, packed villas, or monstrous flats, were then the distinctly impressive residences of distinctly well-to-do business people. Mr. Sturgiss was a distinctly well-to-do business person. The house, double-fronted, had that third sitting-room which confers such an immense superiority over houses of but two sitting-rooms--“Such a convenience in so many ways” as those newly promoted from two to three nowadays remark with languid triumph to visitors still immured in two. Houses--new, two sitting-roomed houses--extended beyond it and around it, and now stretch miles beyond and about, but Mrs. Sturgiss told Rosalie that when they first came there they actually had cows grazing and horses ploughing in fields adjoining their garden. Mrs. Sturgiss told Rosalie this while personally attending Rosalie’s removal of her hat (it was “no hat”; Rosalie felt so glad she had come dressed for either indication) and Mrs. Sturgiss sighed pleasantly as she said it. “Things are going ahead at such a pace now!” said Mrs. Sturgiss. “It’s all very different from what it used to be. Why, the very fact of your coming here, not as my guest but as my husband’s, ‘on business!’ The idea of women being in business, or even knowing anything about business, when I was a girl, why, I can’t tell you how, how positively shocking it would have been considered.” Rosalie laughed. She liked Mrs. Sturgiss, who was motherly and seemed to have her own dear mother’s gentle ways--this personally attending her in her bedroom, for instance. “Oh, there are getting to be heaps of women in business now, Mrs. Sturgiss,” she smiled.