“Why, look here!  We all but ran into each other on the corner, there, of Broadway and Forty-second Street; shook hands, said howdy-do.  How long was I here for?  Was Eleanor with me?  And so on.  If I had a spare half-hour, would I come in and have tea with her at the Knickerbocker?  She’d nodded at two or three passing people while we stood there.  And then somebody said, ‘Hello, Dane,’ and stopped.  A miserable, shabby, shivering little painted thing.  Rose said, ‘Hello,’ and asked how she was getting along.  Was she working now?  She said no; did Rose know of anything?  Rose said, ’Give me your address and if I can find anything, I’ll let you know.’  The horrible little beast told where she lived and went away.  Rose didn’t say anything to me, except that she was somebody who’d been out in a road company with her.  But there was a look in her eyes ...!  Oh, she knew—­everything.  Knew what that kid was headed for.  Knew there was nothing to be done about it.  She had no flutters about it, didn’t pull a long face, didn’t, as I told you, say a word.  But there was a look in her eyes, behind her eyes, somehow, that understood and faced—­God!—­everything.  And then we went in and had our tea.

“I had a thousand curiosities about her.  I’d have found out anything I could.  But it was she who did the finding out.  Beyond inquiring about you, how lately I’d seen you, and so on, she hardly asked a question; talked about indifferent things:  New York, the theaters, how we passed the time out here, I don’t know what.  But pretty soon I saw that she understood me, saw right into me like through an open window into a lighted room.  As easily as that.  She knew what was the matter with me; knew what I’d made of myself.  And by God, Aldrich, she didn’t even despise me!

“I came back here to kick this damned thing to pieces, give myself a fresh start.  And when I got here, I hadn’t the sand.  I get drunk instead.”

He poured himself another long drink and sipped it slowly.  “Everybody knows,” he said at last, “that prostitutes almost invariably take to drugs or drink.  But I know why they do.”

That remark stung Rodney out of his long silence.  During the whole of Randolph’s recital of his encounter with Rose, he’d never once lifted his eyes from the gray ash of his cigar, and the violet filament of smoke that arose from it.  He didn’t want to look at Randolph, nor think about him.  Just wanted to remember every word he said, so that he could carry the picture away intact.  Now that the picture was finished, he wanted to get out of that room, with it; out into the dark and loneliness of the streets, where he could walk and think.