Of course she could! At any moment; by a word; by the mere formulation of the step within her mind, she could abandon her career. Not now. It was not necessary now. But if or when--she used that phrase, in set terms propounding her resolution to herself--if or when the call of her children, of her home, came and was paramount, she could give up everything and respond to it. Oh, happy! Oh, glad discharge of her remorse! When the children wanted her she could just--come back. Field and Company, her career, her successes--what of them? She had done well in her career, she still would do well. Let the claim of home and children once come into the scale against the claim of those ambitions and--she would just come back! Oh, happy! “Come back”? Who was it had said something about that, something about “come back” for a woman, making the expression thus dimly familiar in her mind? Who? Laetitia? No, Laetitia was always associated with another phrase: striking because in terms identical with accusation previously delivered against her. Well she remembered it! On the day following Harry’s visit to the house to take his deserts from poor Aunt Belle and Uncle Pyke, she also had gone there, following his high idea of what was right. She had been refused admittance. There had come for her as the last voice out of that house a quivering letter from Aunt Belle, seeming to quiver in the hand with the passionate upbraiding that had indited it, and a forlorn sentence from Laetitia. “I have done everything for you, everything, everything, and this is how you have rewarded me,” had pulsed the pages of Aunt Belle; Laetitia only had written: “Oh, Rosalie! You could have had any one you liked to love you, but you took my Harry and I shall never, never have another.” Miss Salmon’s cry again! Twice identically accused. Once grotesquely accused; once, on the surface, rightly accused. Both times aware how poignant and pathetic was the cry; not moved the first time, not moved the second. Recurring to her now, she knew again how broken-hearted sad it was, and knew again it ought to move, but did not. Well, not strange now. She was a long way out of those too soft compassions. No, not Laetitia had made “come back” familiar to her. The phrase, as she seemed to recollect its context, was too profoundly practical for the Laetitia sort; and that was why, of course, it moved her nothing. She had learnt, jostling off corners in the market place, what formerly she had only conjectured,--that there was in life no room for sentiment, it clogged; it hampered; it brought sticky unreality into that which was sharply real. “Come back?” No, not Laetitia. Who? Keggo? Yes, it was Keggo; and immediately with the name’s recovery was recovered the phrase’s context. This very matter! “Rosalie, a woman can’t--come back.”