For Jimmy it had stamped her, once and for all, as sterling metal; as one who, however mistaken her judgments, or misguided her actions—­admitting for the sake of argument that they were misguided—­must be taken seriously; admitted to be the real thing.  She’d given indisputable guarantees of good faith.

There was no good, of course, getting warm over the flippant cynicisms of her former friends.  There was no use even in trying to make them understand how the thing looked to him.  But there crystallized in him a wish that he might some day see Rose’s critics fluttering about her and, as it were, eating out of her hand.  He used to amuse himself by arranging all sorts of extravagant settings for this picture.  He never included Rodney in this vengeance, although he felt sure—­indeed Rodney had practically admitted as much to him—­that it had been her husband’s disapproval, rather than the miscellaneous gossip of society at large, which had driven her from the security and promise of the Globe to the exiguities of a fly-by-night road company.  Rodney never brought up the subject again after his return from Dubuque, though it soon became plain enough without that, that his journey had accomplished nothing.

Jimmy kept track of the company’s route after that, through the list of bookings printed in his theater weekly, and when he learned that the tour had been abandoned, he dropped in one night at the Globe on the off-chance that she might have come back and got herself reinstated in the Number One company, which was still doing a prosperous business.

He didn’t expect to find her there; hardly hoped to.  A somewhat better chance was that he might find Alec McEwen in the lobby, and that if little Alec were properly primed with alcohol and led to a discussion of the collapse of the road company, he might volunteer some scrap of information about her.

Little Alec was found in the lobby, right enough, and properly primed in the bar next door, and he described very vigorously, the disgust of Block’s brother-in-law over the lemon the astute partners had sold him; for real money, too.  But not a word did little Alec offer about Rose.

It was Jimmy’s practise to make two professional visits to New York every year; one in the autumn, one in the spring, in order that he might have interesting matters to write about when the local theatrical doings had been exhausted.

On his first trip after Rose’s disappearance, he went faithfully to every musical show in New York, and, as far as Rose was concerned, drew blank.  He’d have taken more active measures for finding her; would have made inquiries of people he knew, had it not been for a sort of morbid delicacy about interfering in a concern that not only was none of his, but that was supremely the concern of Rodney Aldrich, his friend.

But from his spring pilgrimage, he came back wearing a deep-lying and contented smile, and a few days later, after a talk over the telephone with Rodney, he headed a column of gossip about the theater, with the following paragraph: