But all his carefully contrived environment hadn’t the power, it seemed, to shift the current of his thoughts.  They went on dwelling on the behavior of Miss Beach and young Craig, which really got queerer the more one thought about it.  It was hard to conceive of any allusion in the plot or the songs of a silly little musical comedy, pointed enough to account for Miss Beach’s frantically determined effort to keep him away, or for the instantaneous flush that had leaped into young Craig’s face.  Because, after all, they didn’t actually know that his great adventure had come to grief, and whatever either of them might have thought of the applicability of something that was said on the stage, to their employer’s ease, it wouldn’t have been a bit like either of them to discuss it with the other.  In the absence of such a discussion, and the prevision of his going to the show, you couldn’t account for young Craig’s having caught the point instantly like that.  And yet, what other explanation could there be?  There was none, and there was an end of it!

Only it wasn’t the end of it.  The straying search-light of his memory picked up a moment during that last evening at the Williamsons’.  The Crawfords had been there, and somebody else—­a man he didn’t know; and the stranger had said something, a harmless stupid remark enough, about the tired business man and the sort of musical-comedy he liked; whereupon both Constance and Violet had made a sort of concerted swoop and changed the subject almost violently.  John Williamson made a practise of going to the Globe, he knew, but that John, who never spotted an allusion in his life, should have come home and passed the word along, and that all references to musical-comedy should therefore be taboo on Rodney’s account, was simply fantastic.

But the fantasticality of an idea seemed, in his mood to-night, merely to give it the burr-like quality of sticking in his mind, holding on there with a hundred tiny barbs, despite his endeavors to pluck it out.  It even occurred to him that the manner of the man at the cigar counter—­the man he had just told to get him a ticket, had not been quite natural; had been a little exaggeratedly matter-of-fact.  He always got his seats of that man, and the man always made some little encouraging remark, as, for example, that he’d heard it was a good show; or, more non-committally, that he hoped Mr. Aldrich would enjoy it.  To-night, certainly, he’d said nothing of the sort.

The absurdity of this consideration was simply intolerable.  He flung down his paper and went into the adjoining room—­a room full of tables of various sizes, and thronged, at this hour, with members getting up an appetite for dinner by the shortest route.  The large round table nearest the door was preempted by a group of men he knew; some of them well, some only casually, and he came up with the intention of dropping into the one vacant chair.  But just before the first of them caught a glimpse of him, his ear picked up the phrase, “The Girl Up-stairs.”  And then a lawyer named Gaylord looked up and recognized him.  “Hello, Aldrich,” he said, and Rodney would have sworn that the flash of silence that followed had a galvanic quality that wasn’t given it merely by his own imagination.  The others began greeting him, urging him to sit down and have a drink.