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?"