Of course she saw it now, plainly enough.  She sat down again, managing an air of deliberation about it, and gripped the back of the orchestra chair in front of her.  He remained standing over her there in the aisle.

When the heightening tension of the silence that followed this outburst had grown absolutely unendurable she spoke.  But the only thing she could find to say was almost ludicrously inadequate.

“No, I didn’t see it until now.  I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t see it,” he echoed.  “I know you didn’t.  You’ve never seen me at all, from the beginning, as anything but a machine.  But why haven’t you?  You’re a woman.  If I ever saw a woman in my life you’re one all the way through.  Why couldn’t you see that I was a man?  It isn’t because I’ve got gray hair, nor because I’m fifty years old.  You aren’t like that.  I don’t believe you’re like that.  But even back there in Chicago, the night we walked down the avenue from Lessing’s store—­or the night we had supper together after the show....”

“I suppose I ought to have seen,” she said dully.  “Ought to have known that that was all there was to it.  That there couldn’t be anything else in the world.  But I didn’t.”

“Well, you see it now,” he said savagely fairly, and strode away up the aisle and then back to her.  He sat down in the seat in front of her and turned around.  “I want to see your face,” he said.  “There’s something I’ve got to know.  Something you’ve got to tell me.  You said once, back there in Chicago, that there was only one person who really mattered to you.  I want to know who that one person is.  What he is.  Whether he’s still the one person who really matters.  If he isn’t I’ll take my chance.  I’ll make you love me if it’s the last thing I ever do in the world.”

Remembering the scene afterward Rose was a little surprised that she’d been able to answer him as she did, without a hesitation or a stammer, and with a straight gaze that held his until she had finished.

“The only person in the world,” she said, “who ever has mattered to me, or ever will matter, is my husband.  I fell in love with him the day I met him.  I was in love with him when I left him.  I’m in love with him now.  Everything I do that’s any good is just something he might be proud of if he knew it.  And every failure is just something I hope I could make him understand and not despise me for.  It’s months since I’ve seen him but there isn’t a day, there isn’t an hour in a day, when I don’t think about him and—­want him.  I don’t know whether I’ll ever see him again but if I don’t it won’t make any difference with that.  That’s why I didn’t see what I might have seen about you.  It wasn’t possible for me to see.  I’d never have seen it if you hadn’t told me in so many words, like this.  Do you see now?”

He turned away from her with a nod and put his hands to his face.  She waited a moment to see whether he had anything else to say, for the habit of waiting for his dismissal was too strong to be broken even in a situation like this.  But finding that he hadn’t she rose and walked out of the theater.