CHAPTER I

THE TUNE CHANGES

John Williamson's doctor packed him off to Carlsbad just about the time

that Rose achieved the conquest of Centropolis (along in April, 1914,

that was). Violet and their one child, a girl of twelve, went along with

him to keep him company; at rather long range, it seemed, because they

were both in Paris on the first of August, when the war broke out, and

John spent six frantic days getting into Switzerland and out again into

France, before his attempt to join them was successful. They had run the

full gamut of refugees' experiences, by the time they got to England and

secured accommodations on a liner to New York, and the tale got an added

touch from the stratagem Violet employed in successfully bringing off

all her new French frocks.

It took just two hours' steady talking to tell the story, and Violet

figured that during the first week after her return to Chicago, she told

it on an average of three times a day. So that by the time she could

manage a day for motoring out to Lake Forest to see Constance Crawford,

she was ready to talk about something else.

Constance had lately had her fourth--and she asserted, last--baby, and

wasn't seeing anybody yet, except intimates, one at a time; and she

relaxed a little deeper, with a sigh of relief, into her cushioned

chair, when Violet said:

"The same things happened to us that happened to everybody else, so you

don't have to hear them. Oh, it was nice, in a way, being separated from

poor John when the thing happened, because--well, he hasn't got over it

yet. He's still more as he was when we were first engaged, than he's

ever been since. And at thirty-seven that's something! And then it's a

satisfaction about the clothes. It seems as if I must have had a

premonition that something was going to happen, because I bought

absolutely everything I wanted.

"Of course it was an awful moment when John said we couldn't take

anything but hand-luggage. But I got three perfectly enormous

straw-telescopes--you know the kind--about four feet long, and then we

left everything else behind, except a tooth-brush and a comb apiece. And

what with that and the biggest hat box in the world--my, but it's lucky

hats are small!--we managed it.

"But all the stuff about having your automobile taken away and riding in

a cart, and thinking you're going to be arrested as a spy, and living

for days on milk-chocolate and _vin ordinaire_, you've heard it all a

hundred times already, so we'll talk about something else."

"I never heard anything so heroic in my life," Constance said. "But you

don't need to be, because I'm perishing for details.--Unless," she went

on, "it isn't heroism at all, but something else you want to talk

about."

"Just my luck!" said Violet. "I thought I was going to get away with

that. There _is_ something I'm frantic with curiosity about, and you're

the first person I've seen I could ask. I spent two hours trying to get

up my courage with Frederica, but I couldn't. Do you know anything about

them--Rose and Rodney? Does any one know anything about her since she

disappeared from the Globe?"

"Why, I fancy _they_ do," said Constance, "Rodney and Frederica. I don't

know just why I think so. Frank sees Rodney every day or two at lunch

time at the club; says he seems all right. He's working terribly hard.

And the money he's making! Frank says he's a regular robber in the fees

he asks--and gets. He says he speaks of Rose once in a while, and

not--at least not exactly, as if she were dead. You know what I mean!

Just in that maddening, matter-of-course way, as if everybody knew all

about her.

"Frederica won't talk about her at all. I mean, she won't start the

subject, and nobody has the nerve to start it with her. Freddy can be

like that, you know. She'd make a perfectly wonderful queen--did you

ever think of that? Of England. Harriet's the only one who'd talk, and

of course she's gone back. You knew that, didn't you? Oh, but naturally,

since you've talked to Freddy."

Violet nodded. "It all sounded so exactly like Harriet," she said, "as

Freddy told about it. No confidences, no flutters. She didn't even seem

interested until the day England went in. And then at lunch that day,

she said to Frederica, 'I've just cabled Tony that I'm coming back on

the next boat. And I telephoned Rodney just now, to find out what the

next boat for Genoa was, or Naples, and get me a stateroom. Lend me

Marie, will you, to help pack? Because I'll probably have to take the

five-thirty.' Harriet all over. Well, on the whole, I'm glad."

"Oh, yes," said Constance. "She'd always be at a loose end in this

country. She doesn't believe in divorce. She might, of course, if she

fell in love with another man over here. But that's not likely to

happen. And she can't stand America any more. So even an unsuccessful

marriage over there, especially if Italy gets drawn into the war, and

her man gets ..."

"Constance!" cried Violet, horrified.

"Oh, not necessarily killed," Constance went on. "Crippled or something,

or even if he really got interested in the profession of being a

soldier. She's done well to go back to him."

"Anyway, that wasn't what I meant," said Violet. "I meant I was glad for

Rodney and--Rose. Mind you, I don't _know_ a single thing. But I've just

got a hunch that with Harriet off the board, it will be a little more

possible for those two to get together."

Constance looked at her intently. "You've changed your tune," she said.

"I thought you were through with Rose for good and all. I thought what

you were rooting for was a divorce and a fresh start for Rodney."

"I thought so, too," said Violet, "until I saw her."

"Saw her!" Constance cried. "Where? When?"

"In New York on the way home," said Violet.

"Well--tell me all about it," said Constance, when she saw Violet wasn't

going on of her own accord. "You, pretending you wanted to know about

everything, and pretending to be a heroine for not telling me all about

being a refugee! What is she doing? What did she look like? What did she

say?"

"You've changed your tune, too," said Violet. "Because you were through

with her just as much as I was. You didn't want to hear anything more

about her. Of course she could ran away and go on the stage if she

liked, you said, but she'd better not try to come back."

Constance pointed out that she hadn't, as yet, expressed the hope that

Rodney would make it up with her. But she pleaded guilty to a strong

curiosity.

"Well, I can't tell you much," said Violet. "John and I were coming down

Fifth Avenue in a taxi one afternoon, and were stopped by the traffic at

Forty-fourth Street. And right there, in another taxi, was Rose. I

didn't see her till just as we got the whistle to go ahead. I was so

surprised I could only grab John and tell him to look. I did shriek at

her at last, and she saw us and lighted up and smiled. Just that old

smile of hers, you know. But her car was turning west, down past

Sherry's, and we were going straight ahead and we weren't quick enough

to tell the chauffeur to turn, too. We did turn on Forty-third and came

around the block, and of course we missed her.

"We went to three musical shows in the next two days, in the hope of

spotting her in the chorus. But she wasn't in any of them, and then I

simply dragged John home. There was no way of finding her of course, nor

of her finding us, because John's given up the Holland House at last and

taken to the Vanderbilt. But it was rather maddening."

"Well, I don't know," said Constance. "Oh, yes, maddening of course,

because one would be curious. But that sort of curiosity might prove

pretty expensive if you gratified it. Talk about the clutch of a

drowning person! It's nothing to the clutch of a _déclassée_ woman. And

if she's been somebody once who really mattered, and somebody you were

really fond of ... Because it _is_ no use. They can't ever come back."

Violet stirred in her chair. "Of course we're all perfectly good

Christians," she observed ironically. "And once a week we say 'Forgive

us our debts,' besides teaching it to the kids."

Constance broke in on her hotly. "Oh, come, Violet! You know it's not a

question of forgiveness. I don't claim any moral superiority over Rose.

I'm just talking about her social possibility. A person who does an

outrageous thing, knowing it's outrageous, just because he--or

she--wants to do it, can be downright immoral without being impossible.

But a person who's done the other sort of thing, a shabby thing--and

what Rose did was shabby--will always be on the defensive about it. They

can't let it alone. They're always making references you can't ignore;

always seeing references in perfectly harmless things that other people

say. And the only society where they're ever happy, is that of a lot of

other people with shady, shabby things that _they're_ on the defensive

about. And they all get together and call it Bohemia. And they sprawl

around in studios and talk about sex and try to feel superior and

emancipated. Well, maybe they are. All I say is they don't belong with

us. Oh, you know it's true! You hate that as much as I do."

"Oh, yes," said Violet. "Only, since I've seen Rose--even for that

minute--it doesn't seem possible to apply it to her. You know, I don't

believe she's on the stage any more."

Constance asked with good-humored satire, "Why? From the way she looked

in the taxi-cab?"

"Yes," said Violet. "Just from that. There she was in an open taxi, on

Fifth Avenue, at half past four in the afternoon, and she didn't look

somehow, as if how she looked mattered. She wasn't on parade a bit. She

looked smart and successful, but busy. Not exactly irritated at being

held up in the block, but keen to get out of it. The way Frank or John

would look on the way to a directors' meeting. And the way she smiled

when she saw us ... It's not quite exactly her old smile, either, but

it's just as fascinating. It pleased her to see us all right. But as for

her caring a rap what we thought--well, you couldn't imagine it.

Defensive indeed! And poor old John just about went out of his head with

disappointment when we lost her."

"Oh, I'll never deny she's a charmer," said Constance. "All the same ..."

"You wait till you see her!" said Violet.

Violet's report of the glimpse she had had of Rose, together with what

were felt to be the rather amusingly extravagant set of deductions she

had made from it, spread in diminishing ripples of discussion through

all their circle. And then, concentrically, into wider circles. Most of

their own intimate group took Constance's attitude. Forced to concede a

lively curiosity as to what had become of Rose, they still professed

that the way of discretion lay not in gratifying it; at least not at

first-hand. When they were in New York, they kept an eye open for a

sight of her, on the stage and elsewhere, and an alert ear for news,

finding a sort of fearful joy in wondering what they would do if an

encounter took place. They were mildly derisive with Violet over her

_volte-face_.

Secretly, Violet was a good deal closer to agreeing with them than she'd

admit. For, as the effect of her encounter lost its vividness, with the

recession of the encounter itself, she began to suspect that she had

gone unwarranted lengths in her interpretations from it. But under fire,

she stuck to her guns. Her husband, who delighted in her public

attitude, was amazed when she rounded upon him in their domestic

sanctuary, and emphatically took the other side. In his disgust, he made

a very penetrating observation, whose cogency Violet realized, though

she loftily ignored it at the time it was uttered. But three or four

nights later, at an opera dinner at the Heaton-Duncans, she fired it off

shamelessly, as a shot out of her own locker.

"It's all very well," she exploded, "to say that Rose can't come back.

But as a matter of fact she's never been out of it. At least the hole

she left has never closed up. You all agree that she's to be forgotten

and treated as a regrettable incident, but you keep on talking about

her. It's like Roosevelt. There she is all the time."

She didn't dare catch John's eye for the next twenty minutes, but she

knew precisely, without looking, the exasperated quality of his stare.

It was true. They couldn't let her alone. Speculation flared up again,

and this time with a justifiable basis, when it became known that

Rodney had bought the McCrea house; bought it outright, for cash, with

its complete contents.

Of course everybody knew that Rodney was getting rich. And he was doing

it, as Frank Crawford pointed out to Constance, with precisely the same

contemptuous disregard of money that he had shown before his marriage.

"He doesn't care what he charges, and he didn't care then. Only then it

was out of the little end of the horn, and now it's out of the big. And

the thing that seems to make him particularly wild is that the higher

the price he puts on his opinions, the more people there are who think

that nobody's opinion but his is any good. So he just grins at them and

goes up another notch. He's no better a lawyer, he says, than he was

when his practise brought him in ten thousand a year. Of course he is a

better lawyer. He's getting better all the time. He does deliver the

goods. And fighting out these great big cases really educates a man. You

can't be really first-class unless you've got first-class things to do.

And down inside Rodney knows that as well as anybody.

"Only, with all his money, after the way he's talked about that

house--the way he's damned it and made fun of it, what did he want to go

and buy it for?"

Constance had an idea he'd got it at a bargain. The McCreas had made a

flying trip home just to sell it. Their investments had gone off, it

seemed, still further, and besides, Florence had at last found something

in the world to be in earnest about, and that was in France; the

American hospital. Florence had already taken an emergency training

course in nursing. Her husband, whose one marked talent was that of a

chauffeur, was going to drive a motor ambulance, and they were both on

fire to get back to Paris into the thick of things. Almost any round

sum, in absolutely spot cash, would satisfy them. So Rodney, too busy

with other things to take the trouble to invest his money, would have

been in a position to get the house cheap. It was Constance's opinion

that he had.

"Do you know anybody in the world," her husband demanded, "less likely

to be interested in a bargain than Rodney? Or to pick a thing up because

it is cheap?"

"Well, then," Constance said, "you must think he's expecting Rose,

sometime or other, to come back to him. Because if he meant to get a

divorce and marry some one else, he certainly wouldn't want to live in

that house with her. He'd want as few reminders as possible, not as

many. And yet, it was Rose herself, according to Harriet, who was so

anxious, toward the last, to get rid of the place. So there you are!

It's a mystery any way you take it."

John Williamson said he understood, though when Violet pressed him for

an explanation he was a little vague.

"Why," he said, "it's just a polite way of telling us all to go to the

devil. He knows we're all talking our heads off about him, and

sympathizing with him, and wondering what he's going to do, and he buys

that house to serve notice that he's going to stay put. Business as

usual at the old stand. I shouldn't be surprised if he meant the same

message for Rose. That is to say, that the place will always be there

for her to come back to."

Outside their immediate circle, no such imaginative explanations were

resorted to. Rose was coming back of course. And the interesting theme

for speculation was what would happen to her when she did. Would she try

to take her old place; ignore the past; treat that outrageous escapade

with the Globe chorus as if it had never happened? And if she did try to

do that, could she succeed? It all depended on what a few people did. If

they, the three or four supremely right ones, were to acquiesce in this

treatment of the situation, Rose could, more or less, get away with it.

Although even then, things could never be quite the same.

But the sterility of these speculations gradually became apparent as the

winter months slipped away and Rose did not come back. It was felt,

though such a feeling would have looked absurd if put into words, that

by failing to come when the stage was set for her, as by Rodney's act in

purchasing the McCrea house it was, missing her cue like that, letting

them, with such a lot of solemn thought, discuss and prepare their

attitudes toward her, all in vain, she had, somehow, aggravated her

original offense in running away.

And, just as suddenly as they had begun talking about her, they

stopped. Rodney and the twins, living alone in the perfect house, under

the ministrations of a housekeeper, a head nurse and an undiminished

corps of servants, came to be accepted as a fact that could be mentioned

without any string of commiserations tied to it. Their world wagged on

as usual. If, as John Williamson said, the hole where Rose had been torn

out of it had never been closed up, people managed to walk around the

edge of it with an apparently complete unawareness that it was there.

There were fresher themes for gossip:

Hermione Woodruff's amazing marriage, for example, to a dapper little

futurist painter named Bunting, ten years, the uncharitable said,

younger than she was. And then the Randolphs! After all the thrilling

events of their romance, were they drifting on the reefs? There were

straws that indicated the wind was blowing that way.

This was the state of things when Jimmy Wallace threw his bomb.

There was always a warm, corner in Jimmy Wallace's bachelor heart for

youth, and innocence, and enthusiasm. Especially for young girls who

were innocent and enthusiastic. But since he suspected himself of a

tendency to idealize these qualities, even to sentimentalize upon them,

he generally kept a cautious distance off. Rose, with the bloom that was

on her, and the glow that radiated from her the night he was introduced

to her at a dinner party at the Williamsons', had struck him--he was

unconscious of this mental process no doubt--as a person whom it would

be difficult, at close range, to remain quite level-headed about.

Consequently, though his and Rodney's common friendship for the Lakes

had drawn him rather intimately into their circle, his attitude toward

Rose herself throughout had remained deliberately detached and

impersonal. He was not in the least priggish about it. He was quite

willing to let it appear that he liked her and to admit that she liked

him. But their talk had always been not only objective, but about

objects comparatively remote; chorus-girls, for example, and Norse

sagas, to take at random two of his wide assortment of hobbies.

He never felt himself in any danger of idealizing Violet Williamson or

Bella Forrester, and they, along with their respective husbands, were

the nearest approach to intimates he had in that segment of society

which gets itself spelled with a capital S.

Violet's attitude toward Rose, as revealed to him at the little dinner

following the Williamsons' discovery of Rose in the Globe chorus, had

not in the least surprised him. For, with her husband he had recognized

in her biting contempt of the thing the girl had done, the typical

attitude of her class. He didn't do Society very much, but he dipped

expertly now and then. He understood the class--loyalty that is woven

into all their traditions, and knew how violently it was outraged by

Rose's inexplicable bolt.

But, as I said, he went home after that dinner, rather mournful over

Violet's failure to see an aspect of the thing which, it seemed to him,

should have been apparent to anybody: this was Rose's courage in

actually doing the thing. The idea that had evidently prompted the act

was a perfectly familiar guest at their tea-tables. Rose wouldn't have

had to go to "that votes-for-women mother of hers" to pick up the notion

of the desirability of economic independence for women. But, instead of

playing with the idea, Rose had gripped it in both hands and gone

through with it; and at what cost of resolution and courage Jimmy was

perhaps the only one of her friends capable of forming an adequate

conception. But he'd have thought that even Violet might be expected to

see that a mere petulant restlessness wouldn't have carried her through;

might have admitted, if only in parenthesis, the gameness the girl had

shown.

She'd made no attempt to get the cards stacked in her favor, as she

might so easily have done. She must have thought of coming to him for

advice and help; must have known how gladly he'd give it. A note from

him to Goldsmith would have spared her untold terrors and

uncertainties. Yet she had denied herself that help; gone ahead and

done the thing on her own.

He could imagine the sort of test Galbraith had put her to before giving

her a job at all. He'd seen inexperienced girls applying for positions

in the chorus. He knew the sort of work that lay behind her advancement

to the sextette. He knew that her presence there on the stage of the

Globe the opening night, unrecognized by any one in the company as

anybody except Doris Dane of nowhere, represented a solid achievement

that a girl with Rose's background and training might be proud of.

For Jimmy it had stamped her, once and for all, as sterling metal; as

one who, however mistaken her judgments, or misguided her

actions--admitting for the sake of argument that they were

misguided--must be taken seriously; admitted to be the real thing. She'd

given indisputable guarantees of good faith.

There was no good, of course, getting warm over the flippant cynicisms

of her former friends. There was no use even in trying to make them

understand how the thing looked to him. But there crystallized in him a

wish that he might some day see Rose's critics fluttering about her and,

as it were, eating out of her hand. He used to amuse himself by

arranging all sorts of extravagant settings for this picture. He never

included Rodney in this vengeance, although he felt sure--indeed Rodney

had practically admitted as much to him--that it had been her husband's

disapproval, rather than the miscellaneous gossip of society at large,

which had driven her from the security and promise of the Globe to the

exiguities of a fly-by-night road company. Rodney never brought up the

subject again after his return from Dubuque, though it soon became plain

enough without that, that his journey had accomplished nothing.

Jimmy kept track of the company's route after that, through the list of

bookings printed in his theater weekly, and when he learned that the

tour had been abandoned, he dropped in one night at the Globe on the

off-chance that she might have come back and got herself reinstated in

the Number One company, which was still doing a prosperous business.

He didn't expect to find her there; hardly hoped to. A somewhat better

chance was that he might find Alec McEwen in the lobby, and that if

little Alec were properly primed with alcohol and led to a discussion of

the collapse of the road company, he might volunteer some scrap of

information about her.

Little Alec was found in the lobby, right enough, and properly primed in

the bar next door, and he described very vigorously, the disgust of

Block's brother-in-law over the lemon the astute partners had sold him;

for real money, too. But not a word did little Alec offer about Rose.

It was Jimmy's practise to make two professional visits to New York

every year; one in the autumn, one in the spring, in order that he might

have interesting matters to write about when the local theatrical doings

had been exhausted.

On his first trip after Rose's disappearance, he went faithfully to

every musical show in New York, and, as far as Rose was concerned, drew

blank. He'd have taken more active measures for finding her; would have

made inquiries of people he knew, had it not been for a sort of morbid

delicacy about interfering in a concern that not only was none of his,

but that was supremely the concern of Rodney Aldrich, his friend.

But from his spring pilgrimage, he came back wearing a deep-lying and

contented smile, and a few days later, after a talk over the telephone

with Rodney, he headed a column of gossip about the theater, with the

following paragraph:

"_Come On In_, as the latest of the New York revues is called, is much

like all the others. It contains the same procession of

specialty-mongers, the same cacophony of rag-time, the same gangway out

into the audience which refreshes tired business men with a thrilling,

worm's-eye view of dancing girls' knees _au naturel_. And up and down

this straight and narrow pathway of the chorus there is the customary

parade of the same haughty beauties of Broadway. Only in one item is

there a deviation from the usual formula: the costumes. For several

years past, the revues at this theater (the Columbian) have been

caparisoned with the decadent colors and bizarre designs of the exotic

Mr. Grenville Melton. I knew there had been a change for the better as

soon as I saw the first number, for these dresses have the stimulating

quality of a healthy and vigorous imagination, as well as a vivid

decorative value. They are exceedingly smart, of course, or else they

would never do for a Broadway revue, but they are also alive, while

those of Mr. Melton were invariably sickly. Curiously enough, the name

of the new costume designer has a special interest for Chicago. She is

Doris Dane, who participated in _The Girl Up-stairs_ at the Globe. Miss

Dane's stage experience here was brief, but nevertheless her striking

success in her new profession will probably cause the formation of a

large and enthusiastic 'I-knew-her-when' club."

Jimmy expected to produce an effect with it. But what he did produce

exceeded his wildest anticipations. The thing came out in the three

o'clock edition, and before he left the office that afternoon (he stayed

a little late, it is true, and it wasn't his "At home" to press agents

either) he had received, over the telephone, six invitations to dinner;

three of them for that night.

He declined the first two on the ground of an enormous press of work

incident to his fresh return from a fortnight in New York. But when

Violet called up and said, with a reference to a previous engagement

that was shamelessly fictitious:

"Jimmy, you haven't forgotten you're dining with us to-night, have you?

It's just us, so you needn't dress," he answered:

"Oh, no, I've got it down on my calendar all right. Seven-thirty?"

Violet snickered and said: "You wait!--Or rather, don't wait. Make it

seven."

Jimmy was glad to be let off that extra half-hour of waiting. He was

impatient for the encounter with Violet--a state of mind most rare with

him. He meant to wring all the pleasure out of it he could by way of

compensating himself for that other dinner when Violet had decided that

all Rodney's most intimate friends ought really to be told what Rose had

done, in order that they might be scrupulous enough in avoiding subjects

which he might take as a reference to his disgrace.

Violet said, the moment he appeared in the drawing-room doorway, "John

made me swear not to let you tell me a word until he came in. He's

simply burbling. He's out in the pantry now mixing some extra-special

cocktails--with his own hands, you know--to celebrate the event. But

there's one thing he won't mind your telling me, and that's her address.

I'm simply perishing to write her a note and tell her how glad we are."

Jimmy made a little gesture of regret. He'd have spoken too, but she

didn't give him time.

"You don't mean to tell me," she cried, "that you didn't find out where

she lived while you were right there in New York!"

John came in just then with the cocktails and Violet, turning to him

tragically, repeated, "He doesn't even know where she lives!"

"Oh, I'm a boob, I know," said Jimmy. "Give me a cocktail. A telephone's

the driest thing in the world to talk into. But, as I told the other

five ..."

Violet frowned as she echoed, "The other five--what?"

Jimmy turned to John Williamson with a perfectly electric grin.

"The other five of Rose Aldrich's friends--and yours," he said, "who

called me up this afternoon and invited me to dinner, and asked for her

address so that they could write her notes and tell her how glad they

were."

John said, "Whoosh!" all but upset his tray and slammed it down on the

piano, in order to leave himself free to jubilate properly. With solemn

joy he ceremoniously shook hands with Jimmy.

Violet stood looking at them thoughtfully. A little flush of color was

coming up into her face.

"You two men," she said, "are trying to act as if I weren't in this; as

if I weren't just as glad as you are, and hadn't as good a right to be.

John here," this was to Jimmy, "has been gloating ever since he came

home with the paper. And you ... Did you mean me by that snippy little

thing you said about the 'I-knew-her-when' club? Oh, it was fair enough.

I'm glad you said it. Because some people we know have been downright

catty about her. But you both know perfectly well that I've stood up for

her ever since last fall when we came through New York."

John grinned. "When you saw her," he pointed out, "riding down Fifth

Avenue in a taxi, in an expensive dress...."

"It wasn't. I didn't see what she had on. I just saw that she

looked ..."

"Successful," John interrupted. But, meeting her eye, he apologized

hastily and withdrew the word. His gale of spirits had blown him a

little too far.

"I saw," said Violet with dignity, "that she looked busy and cheerful,

as if she knew, in her own mind, that she was all right. And I was glad

for her, and for us. Because you can say what you like, you can't do

anything with the people who have made mistakes and know it, and are

always on the defensive about them. When I saw she didn't feel like

that, that was enough for me. And," she fairly impaled John Williamson

now with her eye, "and you know it."

It was an able summary of her public attitude since the encounter on

Fifth Avenue, and her look at her husband relegated any private

observations of hers at variance with it into the limbo, not of things

forgotten, but of things undone, unsaid, dissolved by the sheer force of

their unfitness to exist, into the breath that begot them.

"You're quite right about it," said Jimmy. "We men are sentimentalists,

as long as things don't come home. But when they do, we're as

uncomfortable about penitents as anybody, and we give them as wide a

berth."

"You're my friend, Jimmy," she said. "There's dinner! But you won't be

allowed to eat. You'll have to begin at the beginning and tell us all

about her! Though I don't see," she went on, "how you can know very

much more than you put in the paper, if you didn't even find out where

she lived."

Jimmy, his effect produced, his long meditated vengeance completed by

the flare of color he'd seen come up in Violet's cheeks, settled down

seriously to the telling of his tale, stopping occasionally to bolt a

little food just before his plate was snatched away from him, but

otherwise without intermission.

He'd suspected nothing about the costumes on that opening night of _Come

On In_, until a realization of how amazingly good they were, made him

search his program. The line "Costumes by Dane," had lighted up in his

mind a wild surmise of the truth, though he admitted it had seemed

almost too good to be true. Because the costumes were really wonderful.

He tried to tell them how wonderful they were, but Violet seemed to

regard this as a digression. She wanted facts.

"Anyhow," he put in in confirmation, "there wasn't a single paper the

next day that didn't feature the costumes in speaking of the

performance. They were the one unqualified hit of the show."

He cast about in his mind, he said, for some way of finding out who Dane

really was. And having learned that Galbraith was putting on the show at

the Casino, and having reflected that he was as likely to know about

Rose as anybody, he looked him up.

"Galbraith, you know," he explained, "is the man who put on _The Girl

Up-stairs_ here at the Globe, winter before last."

Galbraith proved a mine of information--no, not a mine, because you had

to dig to get things out of a mine. Galbraith was more like one of those

oil-wells that is technically known as a gusher. He simply spouted facts

about Rose and couldn't be stopped. She was his own discovery. He'd seen

her possibilities when she designed and executed those twelve costumes

for the sextette in _The Girl Up-stairs_. He'd brought her down to New

York to act as his assistant. She worked for Galbraith the greater part

of last season. Jimmy had never known of anybody having just that sort

of job before. Galbraith, busy with two or three productions at once,

had put over a lot of the work of conducting rehearsals on her

shoulders. He'd get a number started, having figured out the maneuvers

the chorus were to go through, the steps they'd use and so on, and then

Rose would actually take his place; would be in complete charge of the

rehearsal as the director's representative, while he was off doing

something else.

It must have been an extraordinarily interesting job, Jimmy thought, and

evidently she'd got away with it, since Galbraith spoke of the loss of

her with unqualified regret.

The costuming, last season, had been a side issue, at the beginning at

least, but she'd done part of the costumes for one of his productions,

and they were so strikingly successful that Abe Shuman had simply

snatched her away from him.

"The funny thing is the way she does them," Jimmy said. "Everybody else

who designs costumes, just draws them; dinky little water-colored

plates, and the plates are sent out to a company like The Star Costume

Company, and they execute them. But Rose can't draw a bit. She got a

manikin--not an ordinary dressmaker's form, but a regular painter's

manikin with legs, and made her costumes on the thing; or at least cut

out a sort of pattern of them in cloth. But somehow or other, the

designing of them and the execution are more mixed up together by Rose's

method than by the orthodox one. She wanted to get some women in to sew

for her, and see the whole job through herself; deliver the costumes

complete, and get paid for them. But it seems that the Shumans, on the

side, owned The Star Company and raked off a big profit on the costumes

that way. I don't know all the details. I don't know that Galbraith did.

But, anyhow, the first thing anybody knew, Rose had financed herself.

She got one of those rich young bachelor women in New York to go into

the thing with her, and organized a company, and made Abe Shuman an

offer on all the costumes for _Come On In_. Galbraith thinks that Abe

Shuman thought she was sure to lose a lot of money on it and go broke

and that then he could put her to work at a salary, so he gave her the

job.

"But she didn't lose. She evidently made a chunk out of it, and her

reputation at the same time."

Violet was immensely thrilled by this recital. "Won't she be perfectly

wonderful," she exclaimed, "for the Junior League show, when she comes

back!"

Jimmy found an enormous satisfaction in saying, "Oh, she'll be too

expensive for you. She's a regular robber, she says."

"She _says_!" cried Violet. "Do you mean you've talked with her?"

"Do you think I'd have come hack from New York without?" said Jimmy.

"Galbraith told me to drop in at the Casino that same afternoon. Some of

the costumes were to be tried on, and either 'Miss Dane' or some one of

her assistants would be there. Probably she herself, though he knew she

was dreadfully busy.

"Well, and she came. I almost fell over her out there in the dark,

because of course the auditorium wasn't lighted at all. I'll admit she

rather took my breath, just glancing up at me, and peering to make out

who I was, and then her face going all alight with that smile of hers. I

didn't know what to call her, and was stammering over a mixture of Miss

Dane and Mrs. Aldrich, when she laughed and held out a hand to me and

said she didn't remember whether I'd ever called her Rose or not, but

she'd like to hear some one call her that, and wouldn't I begin."

"And of course," said Violet, "you fell in love with her on the spot."

"No, that wasn't the spot," said Jimmy. "It was where she stood on the

Globe stage, the opening night of _The Girl Up-stairs_, when she caught

my eye and gave a sort of little gasp, and then went on with her dance

as if nothing had happened that mattered to her. I saw then that she had

more sand than I knew was in the world."

"And all your pretending that night you were here, then," said Violet,

"all that stuff about an amazing resemblance and a working

hypothesis ..."

"All bunk," said Jimmy. "I'd have gone a lot further if there'd been any

use."

"All right," said Violet. "I'll forgive you, if you'll tell me every

word she said."

Jimmy explained that there hadn't been any chance to talk much. The

costumes began coming up on the stage just then (on chorus-girls, of

course) and she was up over the runway in a minute, talking them over

with Galbraith. "When she'd finished, she came down to me again for a

minute, but it was hardly longer than that really. She said she wished

she might see me again, but that she couldn't ask me to come to the

studio, because it was a perfect bedlam, and that there was no use

asking me to come to her apartment, because she was never there herself

these days, except for about seven hours a night of the hardest kind of

sleep. If I could stay around till her rush was over ... But then, of

course, she knew I couldn't."

"And you never thought of asking her," Violet wailed, "where the

apartment was, so that the rest of us, if we were in New York, could

look her up, or write to her from here?"

"No," said Jimmy. "I never thought of asking for her address. But it's

the easiest thing in the world to get it. Call up Rodney. He knows.

That's what I told the other five."

"What makes you think he knows?" Violet demanded. "We thought he knew

about that other thing, but I don't believe he did."

"Well, for one thing," said Jimmy, "when Rose was asking for news of all

of you, she said 'I hear from Rodney regularly. Only he doesn't tell me

much gossip.'"

"_Hears_ from him!" gasped Violet. "_Regularly!_" She was staring at

Jimmy in a dazed sort of way. "Well, does she write to him? Has she made

it up with him? Is she coming back?"

"I suppose you can just hear me asking her all those questions?

Casually, in the aisle of a theater, while she was getting ready for a

running jump into a taxi?"

The color came up into Violet's face again. There was a maddening sort

of jubilant jocularity about these men, the looks and almost winks they

exchanged, the distinctly saucy quality of the things they said to her.

"Of course," she said coolly, "if Rose had told me that she heard from

Rodney regularly, although he didn't send her much of the gossip, I

shouldn't have had to ask her those questions I'd have known from the

way she looked and the way her voice sounded, whether she was writing to

Rodney or not and whether she meant to come back to him or not; whether

she was ready to make it up if he was--all that. Any woman who knew her

at all would. Only a man, perfectly infatuated, grinning ... See if you

can't tell what she looked like and how she said it."

Jimmy, meek again, attempted the task.

"Well," he said, "she didn't look me in the eye and register deep

meanings or anything like that. I don't know where she looked. As far as

the inflection of her voice went, it was just as casual as if she'd been

telling me what she'd had for lunch. But the quality of her voice

just--richened up a bit, as if the words tasted good to her. And she

smiled just barely as if she knew I'd be staggered and didn't care a

damn. There you are! Now interpret unto me this dream, oh, Joseph."

Violet's eyes were shining. "Why, it's as plain!" she said. "Can't you

see that she's just waiting for him; that she'll come like a shot the

minute he says the word? And there he is, eating his heart out for her,

and in his rage charging poor John perfectly terrific prices for his

legal services, when all he's got to do is to say 'please,' in order to

be happy."

There was a little silence after that. Then:

"Don't you suppose," she went on, "there's something we can do?"

A supreme contentment always made John Williamson silent. He'd been

beaming at Jimmy all through the dinner, guarding him tenderly against

interruptions, with pantomimic instructions to the servants. If the

vague look in Jimmy's eyes suggested the want of a cigarette, John

nodded one up for him. He didn't ask a question. Evidently, between

Jimmy and Violet, the story was being elicited to his satisfaction. But

it was amazing how quickly that last words of his wife's snatched him

out of that beatific abstraction.

"No, there is not," he said.

The tone of his voice was a good deal more familiar to his fellow

directors in some of his enterprises, than it was to his wife. She

looked at him as if she couldn't quite believe she'd understood.

"There is not what?" she asked.

"There is not a thing that we can do or are going to do about Rose and

Rodney. We did something once before and made a mess of it. This time

we're going to let them alone. They're both of age and of sound mind,

and they've got each other's addresses. If they want to get together

again, they will."

* * * * *

"I've had a perfectly bang-up evening," said Jimmy to Violet a little

later when he took his leave.

"I know you have," she said dryly. Then, with a change of manner, "But I

have, too, Jimmy. You believe that, don't you?"

"Sure I do," he said, and shook hands with her all over again. Violet

was a good sort.

Riding home in the elevated train, Jimmy Wallace hummed what he

conceived to be a tune. And when he did that ...!