She saw by the expression that went over his face that her remark had chilled him a little.  He didn’t like to think of her as “a woman,” nor as of his relation to her as accounted for by the fact that he was “a man.”  He’d generalize fast enough about the world at large, but it would always be hard for him to include her and himself in his generalizations.

“Well,” he said when he’d got his pipe alight, “it’s the first question I asked you after—­after I got my eyes open:  What are we going to do?”

“I told Alice Perosini,” she said, “the day before we left to come up here, that I’d come back in a month, and that I’d stay until I’d finished all the work that we were contracted for.  I felt I had to do that.  It would have been so beastly unfair not to.  You understand, don’t you?”

“Of course,” he said.  “You couldn’t consider anything else.  But then what?”

“Then,” she said after a silence, “then, if it’s what you want me to do, Roddy, I’ll come back to Chicago—­for good.”

“Give up your business, you mean?” he asked quickly.

She nodded.  “It can’t be done out there,” she said.  “All the big productions that there’s any money in are made in New York.  I’ll come back and just be your wife.  I’ll keep your house and mother the children, and—­what was it you said to Gertrude?—­maintain your status, if you don’t think I’m spoiled for that.”

That last phrase, though, was said with a smile, which he answered with one of his own and threw in in parenthesis, “You ought to hear Violet go on, and Constance.”  But with an instant return to seriousness, he said: 

“I’ve not asked that, Rose.  I wouldn’t dream of asking it!”

“I know,” she said.  “It’s a thing I’m glad you let me give—­unasked.  But I mean it, Roddy.  I’ve meant it from the first, when I told you you were all I wanted.  There wasn’t any string tied to that.”

“I know,” he said.  “But all the same, it wouldn’t work, Rose.”

“There’s a real job there,” she persisted, “just in being successfully the wife of a successful man.  I can see that now.  I never saw it when it was my job.  Hardly caught a glimpse of it.  I didn’t even see my bills; let you pay them down at the office, with all your own work that you had to do.”

“It wasn’t me,” he said.  “It was Miss Beach.”

She stared at that and gave a short laugh.  “If I’d known that ...!” she said.

Then she came back to the point.

“It is a real job, and I think I could learn to do it pretty well.  And of course a wife’s the only person who can do it properly.”

Still he shook his head.  But he hadn’t, as yet, any reasoned answer to make, except as before, that it wouldn’t work.

“I shouldn’t mind the money end of it,” she said.  “I mean living on yours.  I know I can earn my way, and I know you know it.  So that wouldn’t matter.  I’d never feel like a beggar again, Roddy.”