Chapter 52

COULEUR-DE-ROSE

The fact that the length of time it would take a taxi to bring him down from his hotel to her apartment was not enough to decide anything in, plan anything in, was no more than enough, indeed, to give her a chance to stop crying and wash her face, was a saving factor in the situation.

In the back of her mind, as with a hairpin or two she righted her hair and decided, glancing down over herself, against attempting to change even her tumbled blouse or her dusty boots, was an echoing consciousness of something Galbraith had said that afternoon--"And you know when your next big thing comes along you will do that too."

Without actually quoting those words to herself, she experienced a sudden confidence that was almost serene. In a few minutes now, not more than five, probably--she hoped not more than that--something incalculable, tremendous, was going to begin happening to her. A thing whose issue would in all likelihood determine the course of her whole life. There might be a struggle, a tempest, but she made no effort to foresee the nature of it. She just relaxed physical and spiritual muscles and waited. Only she hoped she wouldn't have to wait long.

No--there was the bell.

It was altogether fortunate for Rose that she had attempted no preparation, because the situation she found herself in when she'd opened the door for her husband, shaken hands with him, led him into her sitting-room and asked him to sit down, was one that the wildest cast of her imagination would never have suggested as a possible one for her and Rodney. And it lasted--recurred, at least, whenever they were together--almost unaltered, for two whole days.

It was his manner, she felt sure, that had created it; and yet, so prompt and automatic had been her response that she couldn't be sure, not for the first half-hour or so, anyway, that he wasn't attributing it to her. It wasn't so much the first words he said, when, opening her door, she saw him standing in the hallway, as it was his attitude; his rather formal attitude; the way he held his hat; the fact--this was absurd, of course, but she reconstructed the memory very clearly afterward--that his clothes were freshly pressed. It was the slightly anxious, very determined attitude of an estimable and rather shy young man making his first call on a young lady, on whom he is desperately desirous of making a favorable impression.

What he said was something not very coherent about being very glad and its being very good of her, and almost simultaneously she gasped out that she was glad, and wouldn't he come in. She held out her hand to him, politely, and he, compensating for an imperceptible hesitation with a kind of clumsy haste, took it and released it almost as hastily. She showed him where to hang his coat and hat, conducted him into her sitting-room and invited him to sit down. And there they were.

And he was Rodney, and she was Rose! It was like an absurd dream.

For a while she talked desperately, under the same sort of delirious conviction one has in dreams that if he desists one moment from some grotesquely futile form of activity a cosmic disaster will instantly take place. A moment of silence between them would be, she felt, something unthinkably terrible. It was not a fear of what might emerge from such a silence, the sudden rending of veils and the confrontation of two realities; it was a dread, purely, of the silence itself. But the feeling did not last very long.

"Won't you smoke?" she asked suddenly; and hurried on when he hesitated, "I don't do it myself, but most of my friends do, and I keep the things." From a drawer in her writing-desk she produced a tin box of cigarettes. "They're your kind--unless you've changed," she commented, and went over to the mantel shelf for an ash-tray and a match-safe. The match-safe was empty and she left the room to get a fresh supply from her kitchenette.

On the inner face of her front door was a big mirror, and in it, as she came back through the unlighted passage, she saw her husband. He was sitting just as she'd left him, and as his face was partly turned away from her, it could not have been from the expression of it that she got her revelation. But she stopped there in the dark and caught her breath and leaned back against the wall and squeezed the tears out of her eyes.

Perhaps it was just because he was sitting so still, a thing it was utterly unlike him to do. The Rodney of her memories was always ranging about the rooms that confined him. Or the grip of the one hand she could see upon the chair-arm it rested on may have had something to do with it. But it was not, really, a consciously deductive process at all; just a clairvoyant look--_into_ him, and a sudden, complete, utterly confident understanding.

He had come down here to New York to make another beginning. He meant to assert no rights, not even in their common memories, he would make no appeal. But something that he felt he had forfeited he was going to try to earn back. What was the thing he sought--her friendship, or her love? She knew! No plea that the inspired rhetoric of passion could be capable of could have convinced her of his love for her and of his need for her love as did the divine absurdity of this attempt of his to show her that she need give him--nothing. She knew. Oh, how she knew!

She stole back into her little kitchen and shut the door and leaned giddily against it, trying to get her breath to coming steadily again. At last she straightened up and wiped her eyes. A smile played across her lips; the smile of deep maternal tenderness. Then she picked up her box of matches and carried them to him in the sitting-room.

He stayed that first evening a little less than an hour, and when he got up to go, she made no effort to detain him. The thing had been, as its unbroken surface could testify, a highly successful first call. Before she let him go, though, she asked him how long he was going to be in New York, and on getting a very indeterminate answer that offered a minimum of "two or three days" and a maximum that could not even be guessed at, she said:

"I hope you're not going to be too dreadfully busy for us to see a lot of each other. I wish we might manage it once every day."

That shook him; for a moment, she thought the lightning was going to strike and stood very still holding her breath, waiting for it.

But he steadied himself, said he could certainly manage that if she could, and as the elevator came up in response to her ring, said that he would call her up in the morning at her office.

She puzzled a little during the intermittent processes of undressing, over why she had let him go like that. She found it easy to name some of the things that were _not_ the reason. It was not--oh, a thousand times it was not!--that she wasn't quite sure of him. There was no expressing the completeness of her certainty that, with a look, a sudden holding out of the hands to him, the release of one little love-cry from her lips, a half-articulate, "Come and take me, Roddy! That's all I want!" she could have shattered, annihilated, that brittle restraint of his; released the full tempest of his passion; found herself--lost herself--in his embrace.

Certainly it was no doubt of that that had held her back. And, no more than doubt, was it pride or modesty. The one thing her whole being was crying out for was a complete surrender to him.

But the real reason seemed rather absurd, when she tried to state it to herself. She had felt that it would be a _brutal_ thing to do. Really, her feeling toward him was that of a mother toward a child who, having, he thinks, merited her displeasure, offers her, by way of atonement, some dearly prized possession; an iron fire-engine, a woolly sheep. What mother wouldn't accept an offering like that gravely!

This thing that Rodney had offered her, the valiant, heart breaking pretense that she needn't give him anything--to her, whose aching need was to give him everything she had!--was just as absurd as the child's toy could have been. But it had cost him.... Oh, what must it not have cost him in struggle and sacrifice, to construct that pitiful, transparent pretense!--to maintain that manner! And the struggle and the sacrifice must not be cheapened, made absurd by a sudden shattering demonstration that they'd been unnecessary. His pretense must be melted, not shattered. And until it could be melted, that aching need of hers must wait.

And then she realized that the ache was gone--the tormenting restless hunger for him that had been nagging at her ever since the first rush of spring was somehow appeased. She'd have said, twenty-four hours ago, that to be with him, have him near her, in any other relation than that of her lover, would be unendurable. Twenty-four hours ago! She thought of that as she was winding her watch. It seemed incredible that it was no longer than that since the saccharine little sob in John McCormack's voice as he had sung "Just a little love, a li-ttle ki-iss," had driven her frantic.

She turned out her light and opened her bedroom window. The phonograph across the court was going again. But now, evidently, its master had come back from Pittsburgh, for it was singing lustily, "That's why I wish again that I was in Michigan, back on the farm."

Rose smiled her old wide smile, and cuddled her cheek into the pillow. She was the happiest person in the world.

When he called her up the next morning, she asked him to come down to the premises of Dane & Company (it was a loft on lower Fifth Avenue) about noon and go out to lunch with her, and she made no secret of her motive in selecting their rendezvous. "I'd like to have you see what our place is like;" she said, "though it isn't like anything much just now, between seasons this way. Still you can get an idea."

He said he would be immensely interested to see the place, and from the cadence of his voice was apparently prepared to let the conversation end there. But she prolonged it a little.

"Do you hear from--Chicago while you're down here, Roddy?" she asked. "Whether everything's all right--at home, I mean?"

It was a second or two before he answered, but when he did, his voice was perfectly steady.

"Yes," he said. "I get a night-letter every morning from Miss French. (This was Mrs. Ruston's successor.) It's--everything's all right."

"Good-by, then, till noon," she said. And if he could have seen the smile that was on her lips, and the brightness that was in her eyes as she said it ...!

It was a part, you see, of his Quixotic determination to make no claims, that he had not said a word, during his evening call, about the twins--her babies!

On the stroke of twelve his card was brought to her, and she went out into their bare little waiting-room to meet him.

"We aren't a regular dressmaking establishment, you see," she said. "The people we have to impress aren't the ones we make the clothes for. So we can be as shabby down here as we please, and Alice says--Alice Perosini, you know--that our shabbiness really does impress them. Shows we don't care what they think.

"You're sure you've plenty of time to see around in?" she went on. "That it won't cut into your time for lunch?"

He made it plain that he had plenty of time, and she took him into her own studio, a big north-lighted room at the back of the building, with the painter's manikins that Jimmy Wallace had told about, standing about in it, and some queer-looking electric-light fixtures suggestive of the stage; a big tin-lined box with half a dozen powerful tungsten lamps in it, and grooves in the mouth of it for the reception of colored slides. And a sort of search-light that swung on a pivot. There was a high cutting-table with a deep indentation in it, in which Rose could stand with her work all around her. On a shelf in a corner he noticed two or three little figures twelve inches high or so that he'd have thought of as dolls had it not been that their small heads gave them the scale of adults. Rose followed his glance.

"I play with those," she said. "Dress them in all sorts of things--tissue-paper mostly. It seems easier to catch an idea small in the tips of my fingers, and then let it grow up. You have to find out for yourself how you can do things, don't you?"

Then she took him out into the workroom, where there were more cutting-tables and power-driven sewing-machines.

"'It never rains but it pours,' is the motto of this business," she told him. "Nobody ever knows what he wants until the very last minute, and then he wants it the next, and everybody wants it at once. And then this place is like a madhouse. We simply go out of our heads. It was like that when Jimmy Wallace was down here. I hadn't a minute for him."

She added deliberately, "I'm glad you didn't come down then," and went swiftly on to explain to him a sort of pantograph arrangement which could be set with reference to the measurements of the manikin Rose had designed the costume upon, and those of the girl who was going to wear it, so that the pattern for the costume itself, as distinct from Rose's master-pattern, was cut almost automatically to fit.

"It's not really automatic, of course," she said. "No costume's done until I have seen it on the girl who's going to wear it. But it does save time."

Alice Perosini came in just then, and a breath-taking spectacle she'd have been to most men in the frock she had on. But it was not Rodney who gasped. It was Alice herself who almost did, when Rose introduced him to her, without explanations, as Mr. Aldrich and said she was going out to lunch with him.

"And there's no telling when I'll be back," she added, "so if there's anything to talk about, you'd better seize the chance and tell me now."

Alice couldn't be blamed if her face was a study. She knew that Aldrich was the name of Rose's abandoned husband, and it would have been natural to believe that this highly impressive-looking person, whom Rose so casually introduced, was he. But the matter-of-fact way in which Rose was trotting him about the shop, and spoke of carrying him off to lunch, seemed to make such a conclusion fantastic.

There was nothing casual about the man, though, she reflected afterward. He'd taken his part, adequately and politely, of course, in the introduction and the fragmentary word or two of small-talk that had followed it, but Alice doubted if he'd really seen her at all. And when a man didn't see Alice--this was a line of reasoning she was quite candidly capable of--it meant an intensity of preoccupation that one might call monstrous--portentous, anyway.

Rose asked him if he minded the Brevoort, which was near by and airy, on a warm spring day like this, and he assented to it with enthusiasm. He hadn't been there in years, he said. She wished, a little later, that she had thought twice and had taken him somewhere else, where she wasn't quite so obviously well acquainted. The cordial salutation of the head waiter, the number of people who nodded at her from this table or that, might well have been dispensed with on an occasion like this. And the climax was when the table waiter, well accustomed to having her bring guests of either sex to lunch with her, and on confidential terms with her gustatory preferences, handed her a menu--as a matter of form--told her what he thought she'd like to-day, and, getting out his pencil and his card, prepared to write it down. She saw Rodney looking pretty blank, so she checked the waiter and said:

"I think I _did_ ask you to lunch with me, but if you'd rather I lunched with you ... You can have it whichever way you like."

He hesitated just an instant; then said he'd like to lunch with her. And somehow their eyes met over that in a way that, once more, made Rose hold her breath. But the lightning didn't strike that time.

Even so, their hour wasn't wasted on the polite topics of custom-made conversation, as, for a while, she had feared it would be; because he asked her, presently--and she could see he really wanted to know--how she had got started in this costuming business. It was evidently a thing she had a genius for, but how had she found it out, and how had she worked out that technique which, even to the eyes of his ignorance, was clearly extraordinary?

And Rose, beginning a little timidly, because she knew there were rocks ahead for him, told him the tale that had its beginning in Lessing's store; the story of Mrs. Goldsmith and her bad taste, of the Poiret model that had suggested her great idea, of the offer she had made Galbraith, the way she had bought her dressmaker's form and her bolts of paper-cambric out of the Christmas rush, and had cut out her patterns in the dead of nights after rehearsals, up in her little room on Clark Street. She told him of the wild rush with which the costumes themselves got made down under the stage at the Globe; of Galbraith's enthusiasm, of the bargain she'd driven with Goldsmith and Block--the unwittingly good bargain that had left her a profit of over two hundred dollars. She told him how Goldsmith and Block had driven a good bargain of their own, hiring her at her chorus-girl's salary for the last two delirious weeks; how insanely hard she'd worked, and how, at last, after the opening performance, Galbraith had offered her a job in New York when he should be ready for her.

Somehow, while she told it, though it was only occasionally that she glanced up at him--somehow, as she told it, she seemed to be hearing it with his ears--to be thinking, actually, the very thoughts that were going through his mind.

The central cord of it all, that everything else depended from, was, she knew, the reflection that this triumphant narrative he was listening to now, had been waiting on her lips to be told to him that night in the room on Clark Street, and that the smoking smoldering fires of his outraged pride and masculine sense of possession, had made the telling impossible--had made everything impossible but that dull outcry of hers that it had ended--like this.

But he never winced. Indeed, now and then when she tried to run ahead in a way to elide this incident or that, he asked questions that brought out all the details, and at the end he said with undisguised gravity, but quite steadily:

"So after the play opened you were just waiting for Galbraith to send for you. Why--why did you go on the road, instead of to New York?"

"He hadn't sent for me yet, and I'd made up my mind, by that time, that he meant not to. And I was too tired just then to come down here and try for anything else. I went on the road for a sort of rest-cure."

He sat for a good while after that in a reflective silence. And, at the end of it, deliberately introduced a new and entirely harmless topic of conversation. She knew why he did that. She understood now that there was more on his program than his manner last night had indicated. That had been a preliminary, but the past wasn't to be ignored forever. A time was coming when the issue between them should be brought up and settled. But the time was not now, nor the place this crowded restaurant.

She was perfectly docile to his new conversational lead, but the fact that she yielded, that she knew it would be beyond her powers to force that issue until he was ready for it, thrilled her--brought the blood into her cheeks. The thing he was doing might be absurd, but his way of doing it was not absurd. He had changed, somehow, or something had changed between them. She engaged all his powers. If there should be a struggle now, his mind would not betray him.

Just before they left the restaurant he asked her if she would dine with him some night and go to a show afterward, and when she said she would he asked what night would be convenient to her.

Her inflection was perfectly demure and even casual, but nothing could keep the sudden "richening" that Jimmy Wallace had tried to describe out of her voice, and the light of mischief danced openly in her eyes when she said:

"Why, to-night's all right for me." She added, "If that's not too soon for you."

He flushed and dropped his hands from the edge of the table where they'd been resting, but he answered evenly enough:

"No, it's not too soon for me."

And then force of habit betrayed Rose into a stupid blunder that almost precipitated a small quarrel.

"Tell me what you'd like to see," she said, "and I'll telephone for the seats."

Then, at his horrified stare, she gasped out an explanation. "Roddy, I didn't mean _buy_ the seats! I don't have to buy seats at any theater. And at this time of year they're so glad to have somebody to give them to that it seems sort of--wicked to pay real money."

"It's my mistake," he said. "Naturally, going to the theater wouldn't be much of a--treat to you. I'd forgotten that."

"Going with _you_ would be a treat to me," she said earnestly. "That's why I didn't think about the other part of it. But I needn't have been so stupid as that. Will you forget I said it, please?"

He smiled now at himself, the first smile of genuine amusement she had seen on his lips for--how long?

"And I needn't have been quite so horrified," he admitted. "All the same, I hope I may manage to hit on a restaurant up-town somewhere, where the waiter won't hand you the check."

It was on this note that he parted from her at Dane & Company's doorway.

But the ice didn't melt so fast as she had expected it would, and she went to bed that night, after he'd brought her home in a taxi and, having told the chauffeur to wait, formally escorted her to her elevator, in a state of mind not quite so serenely happy as that of the night before. She had held her breath a good many times during the dinner, and even in the theater, where certain old memories and associations sprang at them both, as it were, from ambush. But always, at the breaking point, he managed to summon up unexpected reserves for resistance, intrenched himself in the manner of his first call.

Rose both smiled and wept over her review of this evening, and was a long while getting off to sleep. She felt she couldn't stand this state of things much longer.

But it was not required of her. With the last of the next day's light, the ice broke up and the floods came.

She had taken him to a studio tea in the upper sixties just off West End Avenue, the proprietors of the studio being a tousled, bearded, blond anarchist of a painter and his exceedingly pretty, smart, frivolous-looking wife--who had more sense than she was willing to let appear. They had lived in Paris for years, but the fact that he had a German-sounding name had driven them back to New York. It was through Gertrude that Rose had got acquainted with them--she having wrung from Abe Shuman permission for the painter to prowl around back-stage and make notes for a series of queerly lighted pictures of chorus-girls and dancers--"Degas--and then some," as his admirers said. Gertrude was at the tea and two or three others. It wasn't a party.

The two men had instinctively drawn controversial swords almost at sight of each other and for the hour and a half that they were together the combat raged mightily, to the unmixed satisfaction of both participants. The feelings of the bystanders were perhaps more diverse, but Rose, at least, enjoyed herself thoroughly, not only over seeing her husband's big, formidable, finely poised mind in action again, but over a change that had taken place in the nature of some of his ideas. The talk, of course, ranged everywhere: Socialism, feminism, law and its crimes, art and the social mind. Gertrude took a hand in it now and then, and it was something Rodney said to her, in answer to a remark about dependent wives, that really made Rose sit up.

"Wives aren't dependents," he said, "except as they let their husbands make them think they are. Or only in very rare cases. Certainly I don't know of a wife who doesn't render her husband valuable economic services in exchange for her support. I can hardly imagine one. Of course if they don't recognize that these services are valuable, they can be made to feel dependent all right."

Gertrude demurred. She was willing to admit that a wife who took care of a husband's house, cooked his meals, brought up his children, did him an economic service and that if she didn't feel that she was earning her way in the world it was because she had been imposed on. But here in New York, anyway--she didn't know how it might be out in Chicago--one didn't have to resort to his imagination to conjure up a wife who rendered none of these services whatever. "They live, thousands of them, in smart up-town apartments, don't do a lick of work, choke up Fifth Avenue with their limousines in the afternoon, dress like birds of paradise, or as near to it as they can come, dine with their husbands in the restaurants, go to the first nights, eat lobster Newburg afterward, and spend the next morning in bed getting over it. Those that can't afford that kind of life scrape along giving the best imitation of it they know how. Thousands of them--thousands and thousands. If they aren't dependents ..."

"They're not, though," said Rodney. "Not a bit of it. They're giving their husbands an economic service of a peculiarly indispensable sort. The first requisite for success to the husbands of women who live like that is the appearance of success. Their status, their front, is the one thing they can't do without. Well, and it's a curious fact that a man can't keep up his own front. If he tries to dress extravagantly, wear diamonds, spend his money on himself, he doesn't look prosperous. He looks a fool. People won't take him seriously. If he can get a wife who's ornamental, who has attractive manners, who can convey the appearance of being expensive without being vulgar, she's of a perfectly enormous economic advantage to him. She'd only have to quit buying the sort of clothes he could parade her in, and begin spoiling her looks with a menial domestic routine, to draw howls of protest from him. Only, so long as she doesn't call his bluff, she leaves him free to think that he's doing it all for her and that except for her extravagance--extravagance, mind you, that nine times out of ten he's absolutely rammed down her throat--he'd be as rich, really, as he has to try to pretend he is. He tells her so, with perfect sincerity--and she believes it." Rose enjoyed the look in Gertrude's face as she listened to that.

It was half past six or thereabout when they left the studio, and the late May afternoon was at its loveliest. It was the sort of day, as Rodney said, that convicted you, the minute you came out of it, of abysmal folly in having wasted any of it indoors.

"I want to walk," said Rose, "after that tea, if I'm ever to want any dinner."

He nodded a little absently, she thought, and fell in step beside her. There was no mention at any time, of their destination.

It was a good while before Rose got the key to his preoccupation. They had turned into the park at Sixty-sixth Street, and were half-way over to the Fifth Avenue corner at Fifty-ninth, before he spoke out.

"On a day like this," he said, "to have sat there for two or three mortal hours arguing about stale ideas! Threshing over the straw--almost as silly an occupation as chess--when we might have been out here, being alive! But it must have seemed natural to you to hear me going on like that." And then with a burst, before she could speak:

"You must remember me as the most blindly opinionated fool in the world!"

She caught her breath, then said very quietly, with a warm little laugh in her voice, "That's not how I remember you, Rodney."

She declined to help him when he tried to scramble back to the safe shores of conventional conversation. That sort of thing had lasted long enough. She just walked along in step with him and, for her part, in silence. It wasn't long before he fell silent too.

A thing that Rose hadn't counted on was the effect produced on both of them just by walking along like this together, side by side, in step. Just the rhythm of it established a sort of communion--and it was a communion fortified by many associations. Practically the whole of their courtship, from the day when he dropped off the street-car with her in the rain and walked her over to the elevated and kept her note-books, down to the day on the bridge over the Drainage Canal in the swirl of that March blizzard, when she'd felt his first embrace, had been on foot like this, tramping along side by side; miles and miles and miles, as she'd told her mother. And there had been other walks since. Do you remember the last time they had walked together? It was from the stage door of the Globe theater to her little room on North Clark Street. Rose remembered it and she felt sure that he did. The same singing wire of memories and associations that had vibrated between them then was vibrating between them now and drawing up palpably tighter with every half-mile they walked. Their pace quickened a little.

Straight down Fifth Avenue they walked to the corner of Thirteenth Street, and then west. And when they stopped and faced each other in the entrance to the gray brick building where Rose's apartment was, it was at the end of a mile or more of absolutely unbroken silence. And facing each other there, all that was said between them was her:

"You'll come in, won't you?" and his, "Yes."

But the gravity with which she'd uttered the invitation and the tenseness of his acceptance of it, the square look that passed between them, marked an end of something and the beginning of something new.

She left him in her sitting-room while she went through into her bedroom to take off her hat and jacket and take a glance into her mirror. When she came back, she found him standing at her window looking out. He didn't turn when she came in, but almost immediately he began speaking. She went rather limp at the sound of his voice and dropped down on a cushioned ottoman in front of the fireplace, and squeezed her hands together between her knees.

"I don't know how much you will have understood," he began, "probably a good deal. You told me in Dubuque--as you were quite right to tell me--that I mustn't come back to you. And now I've disobeyed you and come. What I hope you will have guessed is that I wouldn't have come except that I'd something to tell you--something different from the--idiocies I tormented you with in Dubuque;--something I felt you were entitled to be told. But I felt--this is what you won't have understood--I felt that I hadn't any right to speak to you at all, about anything vital, about anything that concerned us, until I'd given you some sort of guarantee--until I'd shown you that I was a person it was possible to deal reasonably with."

She smiled, then pressed her hands suddenly to her eyes.

"I understood," she said.

"Well, then ..." But he didn't at once go on. Stood there a while longer at the window, then crossed the room and brought up before her book-shelves, staring blindly at the titles. He hadn't looked at her even as he crossed the room.

"Oh, it's a presumptuous thing to try to say," he broke out at last, "a pitifully unnecessary thing to say, because you must know it without my telling you. But when you went away you said--you said it was because you hadn't--my--friendship! You said that was the thing you wanted and that you were going to try to earn it. And in Dubuque you told me that I'd evidently never be able to understand that you could have been happy in that room on Clark Street, that I'd wanted to 'rescue' you from; that I'd never be able to see that the thing you were doing there was a fine thing, worth doing, entitled to my respect. Well, the things I'd been saying to you and the things I'd been doing, justified you in thinking that. But what I've come down here to say is--is that now--at last--I do see it."

She would have spoken then if she could have commanded her voice, and as it was, the sound she made conveyed her intention to him, for he turned on her quickly as if to interrupt the unspoken words, and went on with an almost savage bitterness.

"Oh, I'm under no illusions about it. I had my chance to see, when seeing would have meant something to you--helped you. When any one but the blindest sort of fool would have seen. I didn't. Now, when the thing is patent for the world to see--now that Violet Williamson has seen it and Constance, and God knows who of the rest of them, who were so tactful and sympathetic about my 'disgrace'--now that you've won your fight without any help from me ... Without any help! In spite of every hindrance that my idiocy could put in your way! Now, after all--I come and tell you that you've earned the thing you've set out to get."

There was a little silence after that. She got up and took the post he had abandoned at the window.

"Why did you do it, Roddy?" she asked. "I mean, why did you want to come and tell me?"

"Why, in the first place," he said, "I wanted to get back a little of my self-respect. I couldn't get that until I'd told you."

This time the silence was longer.

"What else did you want?" she asked. "What--in the second place?"

"I don't know why I put it like that," he said. "Please don't think ... I can't bear to have you think that I came down here to--ask anything of you--anything in the way of a reward for having seen what is so plain to every one. I haven't any--claim at all. I want to earn your friendship. It's the biggest thing I've got to hope for. But I've no idea that you can hand it out to me ready-made. I believe you'd do it if you could. But you said once, yourself, that it wasn't a thing that could be given. It was a thing that had to be earned. And you were right about that, as you were about so many other things. Well, I'm going to try to earn it." "Is that--all you want?" she asked, and then hearing the little gasp he gave, she swung round quickly and looked at him. It was pretty dark in the room, but his face in the dusk seemed to have whitened.

"Is friendship all you want of me, Roddy?" she asked again.

She stood there waiting, a full minute, in silence. Then she said, "You don't have to tell me that. Because I know. Oh--oh, my dear, how well I know!"

He didn't come to her; just stood there, gripping the corner of her bookcase and staring at her silhouette, which was about all he could see of her against the window. At last he said, in a strained dry voice she'd hardly have known for his:

"If you know that--if I've let you see that, then I've done just about the last despicable thing there was left for me to do. I've come down here and--made you feel sorry for me. So that with that--divine--kindliness of yours, you're willing to give me--everything."

He straightened up and came a step nearer. "Well, I won't have it, I tell you! I don't know how you guessed. If I'd dreamed I was betraying that to you ...! Don't I know--it's burnt into me so that I'll never forget--what the memory of my love must be to you--the memory of the hideous things it's done to you. And now, after all that--after you've won your fight--alone--and stand where you stand now--for me to come begging! And take a gift like that! I tell you it _is_ pity. It can't be anything else."

There was another minute of silence, and then he heard her make a little noise in her throat, a noise that would have been a sob had there not been something like a laugh in it. The next moment she said, "Come over here, Roddy," and as he hesitated, as if he hadn't understood, she added, "I want you to look at me. Over here by the window, where there's light enough to see me by."

He came wonderingly, very slowly, but at last, with her outstretched hand she reached him and drew him around between her and the window.

"Look into my face," she commanded. "Look into my eyes; as far in as you can. Is it--oh, my dearest"--the sob of pure joy came again--"is it pity that you see?"

She'd had her hands upon his shoulders, but now they clasped themselves behind his head. Her vision of him had swum away in a blur, and without the support she got from him she'd have been swaying giddily.

"Roddy, old man," she said, "if I hadn't seen--in the first--ten minutes, the thing you--meant so hard I shouldn't see--I think it would have--killed me. If I hadn't seen that you loved me--after all; after everything. After all the tortures you'd suffered, through me. Because that's all I want--in the world."

At that he put his arms around her and pulled her up to him. But the manner of it was so different from his old embraces that presently she drew him around so that what little light there was fell on his face, and searched it thoughtfully.

"You _do_ believe me, Roddy, don't you--that there isn't any pity about it? There isn't any room for pity. There's nothing in me at all but just a great big--want of you. Don't you understand that?"

He did understand it with his mind, but he was a little dazed, like one who has stood too near where the lightning struck. The hope he had kept buried alive so long--buried alive because it wouldn't die--could not be brought out into a blinding glory like this without shrinking--pain--exquisite terrifying pain.

The knowledge she had acquired by her own suffering stood her in good stead now. She did not mistake, as the Rose he had married might have done, the weakness of his response for coldness--indifference.

She went back and began making love to him more gently; released herself from his arms, led him over to her one big chair, and made him sit down in it, settled herself upon the arm of it and contented herself with one of his hands. Presently he took one of hers, bent his face down over it and brushed the back of it with his lips.

The timidity of that caress, with all it revealed to her, was too much for her. She swallowed one sob, and another, but the next one got away from her and she broke out in a passionate fit of weeping.

That roused him from his daze a little, and he pulled her down in his arms--held her tight--comforted her.

When she got herself in hand again, she got up, went away to wash her face, and coming back in the room again, lighted a reading-lamp and drew down the blinds.

"Rose," he said presently, "what are we going to do?"

She knew she was not answering the true intent of his question when she said:

"Well, for one thing we can get a little supper. I don't know what we've got to eat, but we won't care--to-night."

There was a ring of decision in his voice that startled her a little when he said:

"No, we won't do that to-night. We'll go out somewhere to a restaurant."

Their eyes met--unwavering.

"Yes," she said, "that's what we'll do."

They didn't talk much across the table in the deserted little Italian restaurant they went to. Neither of them afterward could remember anything they'd said. They ate their meal in a sort of grave contented happiness that was reaching down deeper and deeper into them every minute, and they walked back to the gray brick building in Thirteenth Street, arm in arm, hand in hand, in silence. But when she stopped there, he said:

"Let's walk a little farther, Rose. There are things we've got to decide, and--and I'm not going in with you again to-night."

She caught her breath at that, and her hand tightened its hold on his. But she walked on with him.

He said, presently, "You understand, don't you?"

She answered, "Oh, my dear!--yes." But she added, a little shakily, "I wish we had a magic-carpet right here, that we could fly home on."

Then they walked a while in silence.

At last he said: "There's this we can do. I can go back to my hotel to-night, and tell them that I'm expecting you--that I'm expecting my wife to join me there. To-morrow? And then I can come and get you and bring you there. It's not home, and it's not the place I'd choose for--for a honeymoon, but ..."

The way she echoed the word set him thinking. But before his thoughts had got to their destination she said:

"Shall we make it a real honeymoon, Roddy--make it as complete as we can? Forget everything and let all the world be ..."

He supplied a word for her, "Rose-color?"

She accepted it with a caressing little laugh, "... for a while?"

"That's what I was fumbling for," he said, "but I can't think very straight to-night. I've got it now, though. That cottage we had--before the twins were born--down on the Cape. There won't be a soul there this time of the year. We'd have the world to ourselves."

"Yes," she said, "for a little while, we'd want it like that. But after a while--after a day or two, could we have the babies? Could the nurse bring them on to me and then go straight back, so that I could have them--and you, altogether?"

He said, "You darling!" But he couldn't manage more than that.

A little later he suggested that they could get the place by telegraph and could set out for it to-morrow.

She laughed and asked, "Will you let me be as silly as I like for once? Will you give me a week--well, till Saturday; that would do--to get ready in?"

"Get ready?" he echoed.

"Clothes and thinks," she said. "A--trousseau, don't you see? I've been so busy making clothes for other people that I've got just about nothing myself. And I'd like ... But I don't really care, Roddy. I'll go with you to-morrow, 'as is,' if you want me to."

"No," he said. "We'll do it the other way."

And then he took her back to the gray brick entrance and, just out of range of the elevator man, kissed her good night.

"But will you telephone to me as soon as you wake up in the morning, so that I'll know it's true?"

She nodded. Then her eyes went wide and she clung to him.

"_Is_ it true, Roddy? Is it possible for a thing to come back like that? Are we really the old Rodney and Rose, planning our honeymoon again? It wasn't quite three years ago. Three years next month. Will it be like that?"

"Not like that, perhaps," he said, "exactly. It will be better by all we've learned and suffered since."