And Rose, beginning a little timidly, because she knew there were rocks ahead for him, told him the tale that had its beginning in Lessing’s store; the story of Mrs. Goldsmith and her bad taste, of the Poiret model that had suggested her great idea, of the offer she had made Galbraith, the way she had bought her dressmaker’s form and her bolts of paper-cambric out of the Christmas rush, and had cut out her patterns in the dead of nights after rehearsals, up in her little room on Clark Street.  She told him of the wild rush with which the costumes themselves got made down under the stage at the Globe; of Galbraith’s enthusiasm, of the bargain she’d driven with Goldsmith and Block—­the unwittingly good bargain that had left her a profit of over two hundred dollars.  She told him how Goldsmith and Block had driven a good bargain of their own, hiring her at her chorus-girl’s salary for the last two delirious weeks; how insanely hard she’d worked, and how, at last, after the opening performance, Galbraith had offered her a job in New York when he should be ready for her.

Somehow, while she told it, though it was only occasionally that she glanced up at him—­somehow, as she told it, she seemed to be hearing it with his ears—­to be thinking, actually, the very thoughts that were going through his mind.

The central cord of it all, that everything else depended from, was, she knew, the reflection that this triumphant narrative he was listening to now, had been waiting on her lips to be told to him that night in the room on Clark Street, and that the smoking smoldering fires of his outraged pride and masculine sense of possession, had made the telling impossible—­had made everything impossible but that dull outcry of hers that it had ended—­like this.

But he never winced.  Indeed, now and then when she tried to run ahead in a way to elide this incident or that, he asked questions that brought out all the details, and at the end he said with undisguised gravity, but quite steadily: 

“So after the play opened you were just waiting for Galbraith to send for you.  Why—­why did you go on the road, instead of to New York?”

“He hadn’t sent for me yet, and I’d made up my mind, by that time, that he meant not to.  And I was too tired just then to come down here and try for anything else.  I went on the road for a sort of rest-cure.”

He sat for a good while after that in a reflective silence.  And, at the end of it, deliberately introduced a new and entirely harmless topic of conversation.  She knew why he did that.  She understood now that there was more on his program than his manner last night had indicated.  That had been a preliminary, but the past wasn’t to be ignored forever.  A time was coming when the issue between them should be brought up and settled.  But the time was not now, nor the place this crowded restaurant.

She was perfectly docile to his new conversational lead, but the fact that she yielded, that she knew it would be beyond her powers to force that issue until he was ready for it, thrilled her—­brought the blood into her cheeks.  The thing he was doing might be absurd, but his way of doing it was not absurd.  He had changed, somehow, or something had changed between them.  She engaged all his powers.  If there should be a struggle now, his mind would not betray him.