“They’re not, though,” said Rodney.  “Not a bit of it.  They’re giving their husbands an economic service of a peculiarly indispensable sort.  The first requisite for success to the husbands of women who live like that is the appearance of success.  Their status, their front, is the one thing they can’t do without.  Well, and it’s a curious fact that a man can’t keep up his own front.  If he tries to dress extravagantly, wear diamonds, spend his money on himself, he doesn’t look prosperous.  He looks a fool.  People won’t take him seriously.  If he can get a wife who’s ornamental, who has attractive manners, who can convey the appearance of being expensive without being vulgar, she’s of a perfectly enormous economic advantage to him.  She’d only have to quit buying the sort of clothes he could parade her in, and begin spoiling her looks with a menial domestic routine, to draw howls of protest from him.  Only, so long as she doesn’t call his bluff, she leaves him free to think that he’s doing it all for her and that except for her extravagance—­extravagance, mind you, that nine times out of ten he’s absolutely rammed down her throat—­he’d be as rich, really, as he has to try to pretend he is.  He tells her so, with perfect sincerity—­and she believes it.”  Rose enjoyed the look in Gertrude’s face as she listened to that.

It was half past six or thereabout when they left the studio, and the late May afternoon was at its loveliest.  It was the sort of day, as Rodney said, that convicted you, the minute you came out of it, of abysmal folly in having wasted any of it indoors.

“I want to walk,” said Rose, “after that tea, if I’m ever to want any dinner.”

He nodded a little absently, she thought, and fell in step beside her.  There was no mention at any time, of their destination.

It was a good while before Rose got the key to his preoccupation.  They had turned into the park at Sixty-sixth Street, and were half-way over to the Fifth Avenue corner at Fifty-ninth, before he spoke out.

“On a day like this,” he said, “to have sat there for two or three mortal hours arguing about stale ideas!  Threshing over the straw—­almost as silly an occupation as chess—­when we might have been out here, being alive!  But it must have seemed natural to you to hear me going on like that.”  And then with a burst, before she could speak: 

“You must remember me as the most blindly opinionated fool in the world!”

She caught her breath, then said very quietly, with a warm little laugh in her voice, “That’s not how I remember you, Rodney.”

She declined to help him when he tried to scramble back to the safe shores of conventional conversation.  That sort of thing had lasted long enough.  She just walked along in step with him and, for her part, in silence.  It wasn’t long before he fell silent too.