Rose wasn't a child even on the day when she came and asked him for a
job, and in the six weeks that had intervened since then she'd been
dressing in the same room with chorus-girls--hearing the sort of things
they talked about in the wings. Indeed, unless he was mistaken, she must
have heard them linking her own name with his. His very special interest
in her, and the way he'd shown it, promoting her to the sextette, and
giving her a chance to design the costumes, was a thing they wouldn't
have missed nor failed to put their own construction on. She must know
then what their inferences would be from the fact of his asking her out
to supper on the opening night.

What he'd been prepared to urge was that now that his connection with
the enterprise had terminated, now that he was no longer a director and
the representative of her employers, she should take him on trust simply
as a friend. He was prepared to answer protests, to offer
compromises--concessions to appearances. He'd expected her to exhibit
some shyness of the taxi. According to his unconscious ideal of the
situation she should have looked questioningly at him--hesitated, and
then let him assure her that it was all right. She should have gasped a
little when the car turned south in the dark little court below Van
Buren Street, have shrunk a little at the isolation the emptiness of the
restaurant enforced upon them, and declined, with something not far
short of panic, her share of that bottle of Burgundy. Because all these
flutters and questionings would just have opened the way for his
assurances--perfectly honest assurances, too, as far as he knew--of the
candor of his feelings and intentions toward her.

She needed a friend, that was plain enough, some one who had her best
interests honestly at heart; some one who knew the pitfalls and the
difficulties of this pilgrimage she'd so strangely set out on, and could
advise her how to avoid them. That he was, potentially, that friend, he
truly believed. And what better way could there be of convincing her of
it than by persuading her to trust him, and then proving that her trust
had not been misplaced?

But what was one to do--how was one to make a beginning when she trusted
him without any persuasion? Trusted him as a matter of course, without
the glimmer of any sort of emotion whatever; about as if he'd
been--well, say, her brother-in-law!

He was at a loss for a peg to hang his definite sense of injury upon.