He hadn’t had a moment’s uncertainty that it was indeed she.  Couldn’t shelter himself, even for an instant, behind Jimmy Wallace’s theory of an “amazing resemblance.”

The others of their world had always known Rose as a person with a good deal of natural and quite unconscious dignity.  She had never romped nor larked before any of them, and she conveyed the impression, not of refraining as a concession to good manners, but simply of being the sort of person who didn’t, naturally, express herself in those ways.  But in the interior privacies of their life together, she’d often shown herself, for him, a different Rose.  She’d played with him with the abandon of a young kitten—­romped and wrestled with him.  And there’d been a deliciousness about this phase of her, which resided, for him, in the fact that it was kept for him alone.

But now, here on the stage of a cheap theater, she was parading that exquisite thing before the world!  Along in the second act, where Sylvia’s six friends come to spend the night with her and sleep out on the roof, there was a mad lark which brought up maddening memories.  He felt that he must get his hands on her—­shake her—­beat her!

Yet, all the while, if any of his neighbors thought of him at all—­became aware of him and wondered at him, it was only because he sat so still.  And when the thing had become, at last, utterly unbearable, and he got up to go out, he managed to look at his watch first, quite in the manner of a “commuter” with anxieties about the ten-fifty-five train.

The northwest wind, which had been blowing icily since sundown, had increased in violence to a gale.  But he strode out of the lobby and into the street, unaware of it.  There must be a stage door somewhere, he knew, and he meant to find it.  It didn’t occur to him to inquire.  He’d quite lost his sense of social being; of membership in a civilized society.  He was another Ishmael.

It took him a long time to find that door, for, as it happened, he started around the block in the wrong direction and fruitlessly explored two alleys before he came on the right one.  But he found it at last and pulled the door open.  An intermittent roar of hand-clapping, increasing and diminishing with the rapid rise and fall of the curtain, told him that the performance was just over.

A doorman stopped him and asked him what he wanted.

“I want to see Mrs. Aldrich,” he said, “Mrs. Rodney Aldrich.”

“No such person here,” said the man, and Rodney, in his rage, simply assumed that he was lying.  It didn’t occur to him that Rose would have taken another name.

He stood there a moment debating whether to attempt to force an entrance against the doorman’s unmistakable intention to stop him, and decided to wait instead.

The decision wasn’t due to common sense, but to a wish not to dissipate his rage on people that didn’t matter.  He wanted it intact for Rose.