it real?’ I hadn’t got the words out of my mouth when the fellow sees me, stands stock still in the middle of the aisle with his mouth open and his eyes sticking out.  ’Register surprise,’ I said to Herb, and looked around for the camera.  And that minute he took two jumps over to where I was standing, grabbed my hands and says, ‘Rose!  Rose!’ kind of choky.  ‘Not by about twenty years,’ I said.  ‘I’m Floss, Rose’s sister.  Let go my hands!’”

Rose—­a transfigured Rose, glowing, trembling, radiant—­repeated, vibrantly, “You said, ‘I’m Floss, Rose’s sister.  Let go my hands!’ And—?”

“He looked kind of stunned, for just a minute.  His face was a scream, honestly.  Then he said, ’But of course.  Fifteen years.  But I had always thought of her as just the same.’  And he kind of laughed, ashamed, like a kid.  And the whitest teeth!”

“Yes, they were—­white,” said Rose.  “Well?”

“Well, I said, ‘Won’t I do instead?’ ‘You bet you’ll do!’ he said.  And then he told me his name, and how he was living out in Spokane, and his wife was dead, and he had made a lot of money—­fruit, or real estate, or something.  He talked a lot about it at lunch, but I didn’t pay any attention, as long as he really has it a lot I care how—­”

“At lunch?”

“Everything from grape-fruit to coffee.  I didn’t know it could be done in one hour.  Believe me, he had those waiters jumping.  It takes money.  He asked all about you, and ma, and everything.  And he kept looking at me and saying, ‘It’s wonderful!’ I said, ‘Isn’t it!’ but I meant the lunch.  He wanted me to go driving this afternoon—­auto and everything.  Kept calling me Rose.  It made me kind of mad, and I told him how you look.  He said, ‘I suppose so,’ and asked me to go to a show to-night.  Listen, did you press my Georgette?  And the blue?”

“I’ll iron the waist while you’re eating.  I’m not hungry.  It only takes a minute.  Did you say he was grey?”

“Grey?  Oh, you mean—­why, just here, and here.  Interesting, but not a bit old.  And he’s got that money look that makes waiters and doormen and taxi drivers just hump.  I don’t want any supper.  Just a cup of tea.  I haven’t got enough time to dress in, decently, as it is.”

Al, draped in the doorway, removed his cigarette to give greater force to his speech.  “Your story interests me strangely, little gell.  But there’s a couple of other people that would like to eat, even if you wouldn’t.  Come on with that supper, Ro.  Nobody staked me to a lunch to-day.”

Rose turned to her stove again.  Two carmine spots had leaped suddenly to her cheeks.  She served the meal in silence, and ate nothing, but that was not remarkable.  For the cook there is little appeal in the meat that she has tended from its moist and bloody entrance in the butcher’s paper, through the basting or broiling stage to its formal appearance on the platter.  She saw that Al and her father were served.  Then she went back to the kitchen,