“You see, when I first told mother and Portia about you—­about how you helped me with the conductor that night, I told them your name, and Portia said she didn’t think it could be you, because you were a millionaire.  I supposed she knew.  Anyway, I didn’t think very much about it.  You yourself,—­just being with you and hearing you talk, were so much more important.  After we got engaged, and you began doing all sorts of lovely things for me, I enjoyed it of course.  But it was just something that went with you.  After we were married and took this house ...  Well, I knew, of course, I hadn’t married you for money, but I thought it would sound sort of queer and prying to ask questions about it; because I hadn’t anything.”

He had looked up two or three times and drawn in his breath for a protest, but apparently he couldn’t think of anything effective to say.  Now though, he cried out, “Rose!  Please!”

But she went steadily on.  “You were always so dear about it.  You never let me feel like a beggar, and—­well, it was the easy way, and I took it.  I got worried once during the winter when I heard the Crawfords talking.  All those people were millionaires, I’d supposed.  They were going on at a dinner here, one night, about being awfully hard up, and I began to wonder if we were.  I spent a week trying to—­get up my courage to ask you about it.  But then Constance got a new necklace on her birthday, and they went off to Palm Beach the next week, so I persuaded myself it was all a joke.  The thing’s come up again several times since, but never so that I couldn’t side-step it some way, until to-night.  But to-night—­oh, Roddy ...!” Her silly ragged voice choked there and stopped and the tears brimmed up and spilled down her cheeks.  But she kept her face steadfastly turned to his.

“That’s what I said about being married and not sowing wild oats, I suppose,” he said glumly.  “It was a joke.  Do you suppose I’d have said it if I meant it?”

“It wasn’t only that,” she managed to go on.  “It was the way they looked at the house; the way you apologized for my dress; the way you looked when you tried to get out of answering Barry Lake’s questions about what you were doing.  Oh, how I despised myself!  And how I knew you and they must be despising me!”

“The one thing I felt about you all evening,” he said, with the patience that marks the last stage of exasperation, “was pride.  I was rather crazily proud of you.”

“As my lover you were proud of me,” she said.  “But the other man—­the man that’s more truly you—­was ashamed, as I was ashamed.  Oh, it doesn’t matter!  Being ashamed won’t accomplish anything.  But what we’ll do is going to accomplish something.”

“What do you mean to do?” he asked.

“I want you to tell me first,” she said, “how much money we have, and how much we’ve been spending.”

“I don’t know,” he said stubbornly.  “I don’t know exactly.”