“I made all the trouble in the first place,” said Galbraith, with a rueful sort of grin.  “It was up to me to think of something.”

And after the elevator she’d escorted him to had carried him down, she stood there in the hallway smiling, with the glow of a quite new friendliness for him warming her heart.

It was natural, of course, that the relation between them after that day should not prove quite so simple and manageable a thing as it had looked that morning.  There were breathless days when the storm visibly hung in the sky; there were strained, stiff, self-conscious moments of rigidly enforced politeness.  Things got said despite his resolute repression that had, as resolutely, to be ignored.

But in the intervals of these failures there emerged, and endured unbroken for longer periods, the new thing they sought—­genuine friendliness, partnership.

It was just after Christmas that Abe Shuman took her away from him and put her to work exclusively on costumes.  And the swift sequence of events within a month thereafter launched her in an independent business; the new partnership with Alice Perosini, with the details of which, through Jimmy Wallace, you are already sufficiently acquainted.  By the time that happened the friendship had gone so far that Rose’s chief reluctance in making the change sprang from a fear that the change would interrupt it.

But the thing worked the other way.  Released from the compulsory relation of employer and employee, they frankly sought each other as friends, and found that they got more out of a half-hour together over a hasty lunch than a whole day’s struggle over a common task had given them.

There were long stretches of days, of course, when they saw nothing of each other, and Rose, so long as she had plenty to do, was never conscious of missing him.  She never, in the course of her own day’s work, made an unconscious reference to him, as she was always making them to Rodney.  But the prospect of an empty Sunday morning, for instance, was always enormously brightened if he called up to say that it was empty for him, too, and shouldn’t they go for a walk or a ferry ride somewhere.

He did the greater part of the talking.  Told her, a good deal to his own surprise, stories of his early life in London—­a chapter he’d never been willing to refer to, except in the vaguest terms, to anybody else.  He told her, too, with more and more freedom and explicitness, as he discovered how straight and honest her mind was, how eager it was for facts instead of for sentimental refractions of them, about certain emotional adventures of his as he was emerging into manhood, and of the marks they had left on him.

All told, she learned more about men, as such, from him than ever she had learned, consciously at least, from Rodney.  She’d never been able to regard her husband as a specimen.  He was Rodney, sui generis, and it had never occurred to her either to generalize from him to other men, or to explain any of the facts she had noted about him, on the mere ground of his masculinity.  She began doing that now a little, and the exercise opened her eyes.