Rodney pulled in a long breath:  “Didn’t I hear some one talking about The Girl Up-stairs?” he asked.  “Is it a good show?  Shall I go to see it?”

The silence was even briefer this time.

Gaylord spoke through what would pass for a yawn.  “I don’t know,” he said.  “I haven’t seen it.”

One or two of the others shook their heads blankly.  Finally somebody else said:  “Just a regular Globe show, I guess.  All right; but hardly worth bothering about.”

Once more they urged him to sit down and have a drink, but he said he was looking for somebody and walked away down the room and out the farther door.

He knew now that he was afraid.  Yet the thing he was afraid of refused to come out into the open, where he could see it and know what it was.  He still believed that he didn’t know what it was, when he walked past the framed photographs in the lobby of the theater without looking at them and stopped at the box-office to exchange his seat, well down in front, for one near the back of the theater.

But when the sextette made their first entrance upon the stage, he knew that he had known for a good many hours.

He never stirred from his seat during either of the intermissions.  But along in the third act, he got up and went out.

I doubt if ever a troglodytic ancestor of his had been as angry as Rodney was at that moment.  Because, long before the pressure of the troglodyte’s anger had mounted to the pressure of Rodney’s, it would have relieved itself in action.  He’d have descended on the scene, beating down any of the onlookers who might be fools enough to try to oppose his purpose, seized his woman and carried her off to his cave.  Which is precisely and literally what Rodney, with every aching filament of nerve tissue in his body, most passionately wanted to do.

The knout that flogged his soul had a score of lashes, each with the sting of its own peculiar venom.  Everybody who knew him, his closer friends, and his casual acquaintances as well, must have known, for weeks, of this disgrace.  His friends had been sorry for him, with just a grain of contempt; his acquaintances had grinned over it with just a pleasurable salt of pity.  “Do you know Aldrich?  Well, his wife’s in the chorus at the Globe Theater.  And he doesn’t know it, poor devil.”  That group at the round table at the club to-night.  He could fancy their faces after he’d turned away.

Oh, but what did they matter after all?  What did any of them matter?  What did anything matter in the world, except that the woman he’d so whole-heartedly and utterly loved and lived for—­the woman who’d left him with those protestations of the need of his friendship and respect, was there on that stage disporting herself for hire—­and cheap hire at that, before this fatuous mass of humanity packed in all about him.  They were staring at her, as the money they’d paid for admission entitled them to stare, licking their lips over her.