So through all the preliminaries to the real talk which he’d said he wanted with her, she was consciously as cordial and friendly as she knew how to be.  She said she hoped she hadn’t kept him waiting too long, and when he apologized for taking her out through the stage door and the alley, with the explanation that the front of the house was by this time locked, she made a good-humored reference to the fact that the alley and the stage door were now her natural walk in life, and that it was just as well she shouldn’t be spoiled with liberties.

He asked her if she had any preference as to where they went for supper, and the way she acknowledged, again with a smile, that she’d rather not go to Rector’s, nor to any of the places over on Michigan Avenue, was an admission, in candid confidence, of the existence of another half of her life which she wished to keep, if possible, unentangled with this.  She showed herself frankly pleased with the taxi he provided, sank back into her place in it with a sigh of clear satisfaction, and was, as far as he could see, completely incurious about the address he gave the chauffeur.  The place he picked out was an excellent little chop-house in one of the courts south of Van Buren Street, a place little frequented at night—­manned, indeed, after dinner, merely by the proprietor, one waiter and a man cook in the grille, and kept open to avoid the chance of disappointing any of the few epicurean clients who wouldn’t eat anywhere else.

But neither the neighborhood nor the loneliness of the place got even so much as a questioning glance from Rose.  She left the ordering of the supper to him, and assented with a nod to his including with it a bottle of sparkling Burgundy.

There is nothing quite so disconcerting as to be prepared to overcome a resistance and then to find no resistance there; to be ready with convincing arguments, and then not have them called for.  This, very naturally, was the plight of John Galbraith.

Rose wasn’t a child even on the day when she came and asked him for a job, and in the six weeks that had intervened since then she’d been dressing in the same room with chorus-girls—­hearing the sort of things they talked about in the wings.  Indeed, unless he was mistaken, she must have heard them linking her own name with his.  His very special interest in her, and the way he’d shown it, promoting her to the sextette, and giving her a chance to design the costumes, was a thing they wouldn’t have missed nor failed to put their own construction on.  She must know then what their inferences would be from the fact of his asking her out to supper on the opening night.