“And there’s no telling when I’ll be back,” she added, “so if there’s anything to talk about, you’d better seize the chance and tell me now.”

Alice couldn’t be blamed if her face was a study.  She knew that Aldrich was the name of Rose’s abandoned husband, and it would have been natural to believe that this highly impressive-looking person, whom Rose so casually introduced, was he.  But the matter-of-fact way in which Rose was trotting him about the shop, and spoke of carrying him off to lunch, seemed to make such a conclusion fantastic.

There was nothing casual about the man, though, she reflected afterward.  He’d taken his part, adequately and politely, of course, in the introduction and the fragmentary word or two of small-talk that had followed it, but Alice doubted if he’d really seen her at all.  And when a man didn’t see Alice—­this was a line of reasoning she was quite candidly capable of—­it meant an intensity of preoccupation that one might call monstrous—­portentous, anyway.

Rose asked him if he minded the Brevoort, which was near by and airy, on a warm spring day like this, and he assented to it with enthusiasm.  He hadn’t been there in years, he said.  She wished, a little later, that she had thought twice and had taken him somewhere else, where she wasn’t quite so obviously well acquainted.  The cordial salutation of the head waiter, the number of people who nodded at her from this table or that, might well have been dispensed with on an occasion like this.  And the climax was when the table waiter, well accustomed to having her bring guests of either sex to lunch with her, and on confidential terms with her gustatory preferences, handed her a menu—­as a matter of form—­told her what he thought she’d like to-day, and, getting out his pencil and his card, prepared to write it down.  She saw Rodney looking pretty blank, so she checked the waiter and said: 

“I think I did ask you to lunch with me, but if you’d rather I lunched with you ...  You can have it whichever way you like.”

He hesitated just an instant; then said he’d like to lunch with her.  And somehow their eyes met over that in a way that, once more, made Rose hold her breath.  But the lightning didn’t strike that time.

Even so, their hour wasn’t wasted on the polite topics of custom-made conversation, as, for a while, she had feared it would be; because he asked her, presently—­and she could see he really wanted to know—­how she had got started in this costuming business.  It was evidently a thing she had a genius for, but how had she found it out, and how had she worked out that technique which, even to the eyes of his ignorance, was clearly extraordinary?