e said, "Miss Beach doesn't want
me to buy a ticket for _The Girl Up-stairs_. She says I won't like it.
Do you agree with her?"

A flare of red came up into the boy's face, and his jaw dropped. Then,
as well as he could, he pulled himself together. "Yes, sir," he said,
swung around and marched back into his own cubby-hole.

"You needn't telephone, Miss Beach," said Rodney curtly. And without
another word he put on his hat and overcoat and left the office.

It was not a very profound emotion that drove him along; a violent
superficial one, rather, like the gusty wrath which had precipitated the
last phase of his great struggle with Rose--the time he told her he
wouldn't jeopardize the children's lives to satisfy her whims. He was
furiously impatient with the good intentions of his friends. He had been
aware of a sort of unnatural gentleness about them ever since Christmas;
but either it had intensified during the last ten days, or else he had
suddenly got more sensitive to it. The latter, most likely. And yet
Violet Williamson's manner the last Sunday evening he had spent at her
house, had stopped just short of a hushed voice and tiptoes. He'd been
momentarily expecting her to offer him an egg-nog.

But this paroxysm of tact that had just broken out in his office was
really too much. Of course they'd been talking him over, those two. It
must have been amply obvious to them for a good while that there was
something more than met the eye, about that long visit of his wife's to
California. And it was nice and human of them to feel sorry for him. But
that they should decide, because _The Girl Up-stairs_ contained some
rather coarsely derisive song, perhaps, about men whose wives run away
from them, or something in the plot about a trip to California with a
less honorable purpose than its ostensible one, that he should on no
account be permitted to see the show, was ridiculous. He walked straight
over to the club and told the man at the cigar counter to get him a
ticket for to-night's performance.

It was then after five and he decided not to go back to the office
before dinner. In fact, he might as well dine down here. So he went up
to the lounge, armed himself with an evening paper against casual
acquaintances, ordered a drink and dropped into a big leather chair.

But all his carefully contrived environment hadn't the power, it seemed,
to shift the current of his thoughts. They went on dwelling on the
behavior of Mis