ff, 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.

A thing that Rose hadn't counted on was the effect produced on both of
them just by walking along like this together, side by side, in step.
Just the rhythm of it established a sort of communion--and it was a
communion fortified by many associations. Practically the whole of their
courtship, from the day when he dropped off the street-car with her in
the rain and walked her over to the elevated and kept her note-books,
down to the day on the bridge over the Drainage Canal in the swirl of
that March blizzard, when she'd felt his first embrace, had been on foot
like this, tramping along sid