She would make no first advances, only plenty of second
ones, and, condoning no discrimination, would treat no omission as
venial. She would keep all concessions till afterwards; then she
would make them one by one. Fighting society was quite as hard as
her grandmother had said it would be; but there was a tension in it
which made the dreariness vibrate--the dreariness of such a winter as
she had just passed. Her companion had cried at the end of it, and
she had cried all through; only her tears had been private, while her
mother's had fallen once for all, at luncheon on the bleak Easter
Monday--produced by the way a silent survey of the deadly square
brought home to her that every creature but themselves was out of
town and having tremendous fun. Rose felt that it was useless to
attempt to explain simply by her mourning this severity of solitude;
for if people didn't go to parties (at least a few didn't) for six
months after their father died, this was the very time other people
took for coming to see them. It was not too much to say that during
this first winter of Rose's period with her mother she had no
communication whatever with the world. It had the effect of making
her take to reading the new American books: she wanted to see how
girls got on by themselves.
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