"All the
same, I hope I may manage to hit on a restaurant up-town somewhere,
where the waiter won't hand you the check."

It was on this note that he parted from her at Dane & Company's doorway.

But the ice didn't melt so fast as she had expected it would, and she
went to bed that night, after he'd brought her home in a taxi and,
having told the chauffeur to wait, formally escorted her to her
elevator, in a state of mind not quite so serenely happy as that of the
night before. She had held her breath a good many times during the
dinner, and even in the theater, where certain old memories and
associations sprang at them both, as it were, from ambush. But always,
at the breaking point, he managed to summon up unexpected reserves for
resistance, intrenched himself in the manner of his first call.

Rose both smiled and wept over her review of this evening, and was a
long while getting off to sleep. She felt she couldn't stand this state
of things much longer.

But it was not required of her. With the last of the next day's light,
the ice broke up and the floods came.

She had taken him to a studio tea in the upper sixties just off West End
Avenue, the proprietors of the studio being a tousled, bearded, blond
anarchist of a painter and his exceedingly pretty, smart,
frivolous-looking wife--who had more sense than she was willing to let
appear. They had lived in Paris for years, but the fact that he had a
German-sounding name had driven them back to New York. It was through
Gertrude that Rose had got acquainted with them--she having wrung from
Abe Shuman permission for the painter to prowl around back-stage and
make notes for a series of queerly lighted pictures of chorus-girls and
dancers--"Degas--and then some," as his admirers said. Gertrude was at
the tea and two or three others. It wasn't a party.

The two men had instinctively drawn controversial swords almost at sight
of each other and for the hour and a half that they were together the
combat raged mightily, to the unmixed satisfaction of both participants.
The feelings of the bystanders were perhaps more diverse, but Rose, at
least, enjoyed herself thoroughly, not only over seeing her husband's
big, formidable, finely poised mind in action again, but over a change
that had taken place in the nature of some of his ideas. The talk, of
course, ranged everywhere: Socialism, feminism, law and its crimes, art
and the social mind. Gertrude took a hand in it now and t