But Rose’s letter put a different face on the matter.  He felt perfectly sure that Randolph hadn’t been analyzing her during that spare half-hour at the Knickerbocker.  The shoe, it appeared, had been on the other foot.  The fact that she’d put him, partly at least, in possession of what she had observed and what she guessed, gave him a sort of shield against the doctor.  He told himself that his principal reason for going was to get a little bit more information about Rose than her letters provided him with.  But the anticipation he dwelt on with the greatest pleasure, really, was of saying, “Oh, yes.  Rose wrote that she’d seen you.”

So one evening, after keeping up the pretense through his solitary dinner and the cigar that followed it, that he meant presently to go up to his study and correct galley proofs on an enormous brief, he slipped out about nine o’clock, and walked around to the Randolphs’ new house.

This latest venture of Eleanor’s had attracted a good deal of comment among her friends.  Somebody called it, with a rather cruel double entendre, Bertie Willis’ last word.  In the obvious sense of the phrase, this was true.  Eleanor had given him a free hand, and he had gone his limit.  He’d been working slowly backward from Jacobean, through Tudor.  But this thing was perfect Perpendicular.  You could, as John Williamson said, kid yourself into the notion, when you walked under the keel-shaped arch to their main doorway, that you were going to church.  And the style was carried out with inexorable rigor, down to the most minute details.  But since everybody knew that the latest thing, the inevitably coming thing, was the pure unadulterated ugliness of Georgian, a style that Bertie had opposed venomously (because he couldn’t build it, the uncharitable said); and because even Bertie’s carefully preserved youth was felt to have gone a little stale and it was no longer fashionable to consider his charms irresistible, the phrase, “his last word,” was instantly understood, as I said, to have a secondary sense.

No one, of course, could tell Eleanor anything about what the coming styles were going to be, in architecture or anything else.  She was one of these persons with simply a sixth sense for fashions, and her having gone to Bertie Willis, instead of to young Mellish of the historic New York firm, McCleod, Hill, Stone & Black, who was doing such delightfully hideous things in Georgian, caused, among her friends, a good deal of comment.  Her explanation that medicine was a medieval profession and that she had to have a medieval house to go with James, was felt to be a mere evasion.

It was recognized that one had to flirt with Bertie while he was building her house.  And in the days when everybody else had been doing it, too, it didn’t matter.  But now that the celebrated hareem had ceased to exist, it was felt that one would do well to be a little careful; at least, to put a more or less summary end to the flirtation when the house was finished.  But Eleanor hadn’t done that.  She was playing with him more exclusively than ever.