ted with coffee and catsup stains, and ordered his
breakfast of a yawning waiter. He even forced himself, when it was
brought in, to eat it. If it was good enough for Rose, wasn't it good
enough for him?

And all the while he kept his eye on the street door, in the
irrepressible, unacknowledged hope that the gods would be kind enough to
bring her there.

But it was a mocking hope, he knew, and he didn't linger after he'd
finished. He walked down-town to his office. It was still pretty
early--not yet eight o'clock. Even his office boy wouldn't be down for
three-quarters of an hour. He was safe, he found himself saying, for so
long, anyway.

He sat down at his desk and stared bewildered at the stack of letters
that lay there awaiting his signature. They were the very letters Miss
Beach had been typing when he had told her to telephone to the club and
get him a seat for _The Girl Up-stairs_, by way of passing a pleasant
evening;--and had laughed at her when she protested. Oh, God!

He felt like a sort of inverted Rip Van Winkle--like a man who had been
away twenty years--in hell twenty years!--and coming back found
everything exactly as he had left it. As if, in reality, his absence had
lasted only overnight.

He pulled himself together and began to read the letters, but
interrupted himself before he'd gone far, to laugh aloud. The laugh
startled him a little. He hadn't expected to do more than smile. But
certainly it was worth a laugh, the solemn importance with which he'd
dictated those letters; the notion that it mattered what he said, how he
advised his clients in their bloodless, parchment-like affairs; that
anything in all the files behind the black door of that vault
represented more than the empty victories and defeats of a childish
game. The dead smug orderliness of the place, with the infallible Miss
Beach as its presiding genius, infuriated him. Clearly he couldn't stay
here till he was better in hand than this.

He signed his letters without reading them, and scribbled a note to
Craig that he'd been called out of town for a day or two on a matter of
urgent personal business. He hadn't thought of actually going out of
town until the note was written. But once he saw the statement in black
and white, the notion of making it true, invited him. He'd run off to
some small city where no curious eyes, animated by the knowledge that he
was Rodney Aldrich whose wife had left him to become a chorus-girl,
could st