While he was still staring at her, young Craig came bursting blithely out of his office, a bundle of papers in his hand and the pucker of a silent whistle still on his lips.  “Oh, Miss Beach!” he said, and then stopped short, seeing that something had happened.

Rodney tried an experiment.  “Craig,” he said, “Miss Beach doesn’t want me to buy a ticket for The Girl Up-stairs.  She says I won’t like it.  Do you agree with her?”

A flare of red came up into the boy’s face, and his jaw dropped.  Then, as well as he could, he pulled himself together.  “Yes, sir,” he said, swung around and marched back into his own cubby-hole.

“You needn’t telephone, Miss Beach,” said Rodney curtly.  And without another word he put on his hat and overcoat and left the office.

It was not a very profound emotion that drove him along; a violent superficial one, rather, like the gusty wrath which had precipitated the last phase of his great struggle with Rose—­the time he told her he wouldn’t jeopardize the children’s lives to satisfy her whims.  He was furiously impatient with the good intentions of his friends.  He had been aware of a sort of unnatural gentleness about them ever since Christmas; but either it had intensified during the last ten days, or else he had suddenly got more sensitive to it.  The latter, most likely.  And yet Violet Williamson’s manner the last Sunday evening he had spent at her house, had stopped just short of a hushed voice and tiptoes.  He’d been momentarily expecting her to offer him an egg-nog.

But this paroxysm of tact that had just broken out in his office was really too much.  Of course they’d been talking him over, those two.  It must have been amply obvious to them for a good while that there was something more than met the eye, about that long visit of his wife’s to California.  And it was nice and human of them to feel sorry for him.  But that they should decide, because The Girl Up-stairs contained some rather coarsely derisive song, perhaps, about men whose wives run away from them, or something in the plot about a trip to California with a less honorable purpose than its ostensible one, that he should on no account be permitted to see the show, was ridiculous.  He walked straight over to the club and told the man at the cigar counter to get him a ticket for to-night’s performance.

It was then after five and he decided not to go back to the office before dinner.  In fact, he might as well dine down here.  So he went up to the lounge, armed himself with an evening paper against casual acquaintances, ordered a drink and dropped into a big leather chair.