bout the room; at
the wonderful ornate perfection of the Italian marble chimney-piece that
framed the dying fire; at the tall carved chairs, the simple grandeur of
the three-hundred-year-old table and the subdued richness, in the half
light, of the tapestries that hung on the walls.

It was Florence McCrea's masterpiece, this room. But this morning its
perfections mocked him with the ferocious irony of the contrast they
presented to that other room--that unspeakably horrible room where he
had left Rose. Details of its hideousness, that he hadn't been conscious
of observing during the hours he had spent in it, came back to him,
bitten out with acid clearness;--the varnished top of the bureau mottled
with water stains, the worn splintered floor, the horrible hard blue of
the iron bed, the florid pattern on the hand-painted slop-jar.

And that abominable room was where Rose was now! She was sitting,
perhaps, just as he'd left her, with that look of frozen, dumb agony
still in her face, while he sat here ...

He sprang up in a sort of frenzy. The parlor maid would be in here any
minute now, on her morning rounds, and would wish him a respectful good
morning, and ask him what he wanted for breakfast. And then, with
automatic perfection, would appear his coffee, his grapefruit, and the
rest of it--all exactly right, the result of a perfect precalculation of
his wishes. While Rose ...

He put on his outdoor things and left the house, motivated now, for the
first time in many hours, with a clear purpose. He'd go back to that
room and get Rose out of it. He was incapable of planning how it should
be done, but somehow--anyhow, it should be; that was all he knew!

But this purpose was frustrated the moment he reached Clark Street, by
the realization that he hadn't an idea within half a mile at least,
where the room was. Neither when he went into it with Rose, nor when he
left it, had he picked up any sort of landmark. There was a passage, he
remembered, leading back between two buildings, which projected to the
sidewalk. But there were a dozen of these in every block.

A miserable little lunch-room caught his eye, displaying in its dingy
windows, pies, oranges, big shallow pans of pork and beans. This was the
sort of place Rose would have to come to, he reflected, for her
breakfast. And with that thought--hardly the conscious hope that she
would actually come to this place this morning--he turned in, sat down
at a cloth spot