She nodded.  “Good-by,” she said.

Rodney walked back to the railway station where he had checked his bag. 
In two hours he was on a train bound back to Chicago.

Various things occurred to him during the journey eastward that he might have said to Portia.  He hadn’t asked, for instance, whether Rose’s embargo on news of herself to him had been made effective also in the other direction.  Had she cut herself off from Portia’s bulletins about himself and the babies?  Could Portia have transmitted a message from him to Rose—­the one Frederica had declined to take?  But he felt in a way rather glad that he hadn’t asked any more questions, nor offered any messages.  He wasn’t looking now for an intermediary between Rose and himself.  He wanted Rose, and he meant to find her.  His whole mind, by now, had crystallized into that hard-faceted, sharp-edged determination.  The sore masculine vanity that had kept him from appealing to the man most likely to be able to help him was almost incredible now.

From the railway station in Chicago, the moment he got in, he telephoned Jimmy Wallace at his newspaper office.  It was then about half past four in the afternoon.  Jimmy couldn’t leave for another hour, it seemed.  It was his afternoon at home to press agents, and he always gave them till five-thirty to drop in.  But he didn’t think there were likely to be any more to-day, and if Rodney would come over ...

Rodney got into a taxi and came, and found the critic at his shabby old desk under a green-shaded electric light, in the midst of a vast solitude, the editorial offices of an evening newspaper at that hour being about the loneliest place in the world.  There was a rusty look about this particular local room, too, that made you wonder that any real news ever could emanate from it.  Yet only this afternoon they had beaten the city in the announcement of the failure of the Mortimore-Milligan string of banks.

“I’ve come,” said Rodney, finding a sort of fierce satisfaction in grasping the nettle as tightly as possible, “to see if you can tell me anything about my wife.”

Jimmy may have felt a bit flushed and flustered, but the fact didn’t show, and an imaginative insight he was in the habit of denying the possession of led him to draw most of the sting out of the situation with the first words he said.

“I’ll tell you all I know, of course, but it isn’t much.  Because I haven’t had a word with her since the last time I dined at your house, way back last September, I think it was.  I saw her on the stage at the Globe, the opening night of The Girl Up-stairs, and I saw that she recognized me.  That’s how I knew it was really she.  And—­well, I want you to know this!  I haven’t told anybody that she was there.”

“You needn’t tell me that,” said Rodney.  “I’m sure of it.  But I’m glad you did tell me the other thing.  But here’s the situation:  she’s left that company; left it, I believe, as a result of a talk I had with her after I found her there, and I don’t know where she is.  The one thing I have got to do just now is to find her.  I’ve asked at the theater, and they won’t tell me.  I imagine they’re acting on her instructions.  And as I don’t even know the name she goes by I’ve found it pretty hard to get anywhere.  I want you to help me.”