“And of course,” said Violet, “you fell in love with her on the spot.”

“No, that wasn’t the spot,” said Jimmy.  “It was where she stood on the Globe stage, the opening night of The Girl Up-stairs, when she caught my eye and gave a sort of little gasp, and then went on with her dance as if nothing had happened that mattered to her.  I saw then that she had more sand than I knew was in the world.”

“And all your pretending that night you were here, then,” said Violet, “all that stuff about an amazing resemblance and a working hypothesis ...”

“All bunk,” said Jimmy.  “I’d have gone a lot further if there’d been any use.”

“All right,” said Violet.  “I’ll forgive you, if you’ll tell me every word she said.”

Jimmy explained that there hadn’t been any chance to talk much.  The costumes began coming up on the stage just then (on chorus-girls, of course) and she was up over the runway in a minute, talking them over with Galbraith.  “When she’d finished, she came down to me again for a minute, but it was hardly longer than that really.  She said she wished she might see me again, but that she couldn’t ask me to come to the studio, because it was a perfect bedlam, and that there was no use asking me to come to her apartment, because she was never there herself these days, except for about seven hours a night of the hardest kind of sleep.  If I could stay around till her rush was over ...  But then, of course, she knew I couldn’t.”

“And you never thought of asking her,” Violet wailed, “where the apartment was, so that the rest of us, if we were in New York, could look her up, or write to her from here?”

“No,” said Jimmy.  “I never thought of asking for her address.  But it’s the easiest thing in the world to get it.  Call up Rodney.  He knows.  That’s what I told the other five.”

“What makes you think he knows?” Violet demanded.  “We thought he knew about that other thing, but I don’t believe he did.”

“Well, for one thing,” said Jimmy, “when Rose was asking for news of all of you, she said ’I hear from Rodney regularly.  Only he doesn’t tell me much gossip.’”

“Hears from him!” gasped Violet. “Regularly!” She was staring at Jimmy in a dazed sort of way.  “Well, does she write to him?  Has she made it up with him?  Is she coming back?”

“I suppose you can just hear me asking her all those questions?  Casually, in the aisle of a theater, while she was getting ready for a running jump into a taxi?”

The color came up into Violet’s face again.  There was a maddening sort of jubilant jocularity about these men, the looks and almost winks they exchanged, the distinctly saucy quality of the things they said to her.

“Of course,” she said coolly, “if Rose had told me that she heard from Rodney regularly, although he didn’t send her much of the gossip, I shouldn’t have had to ask her those questions I’d have known from the way she looked and the way her voice sounded, whether she was writing to Rodney or not and whether she meant to come back to him or not; whether she was ready to make it up if he was—­all that.  Any woman who knew her at all would.  Only a man, perfectly infatuated, grinning ...  See if you can’t tell what she looked like and how she said it.”