for all, as sterling metal; as
one who, however mistaken her judgments, or misguided her
actions--admitting for the sake of argument that they were
misguided--must be taken seriously; admitted to be the real thing. She'd
given indisputable guarantees of good faith.

There was no good, of course, getting warm over the flippant cynicisms
of her former friends. There was no use even in trying to make them
understand how the thing looked to him. But there crystallized in him a
wish that he might some day see Rose's critics fluttering about her and,
as it were, eating out of her hand. He used to amuse himself by
arranging all sorts of extravagant settings for this picture. He never
included Rodney in this vengeance, although he felt sure--indeed Rodney
had practically admitted as much to him--that it had been her husband's
disapproval, rather than the miscellaneous gossip of society at large,
which had driven her from the security and promise of the Globe to the
exiguities of a fly-by-night road company. Rodney never brought up the
subject again after his return from Dubuque, though it soon became plain
enough without that, that his journey had accomplished nothing.

Jimmy kept track of the company's route after that, through the list of
bookings printed in his theater weekly, and when he learned that the
tour had been abandoned, he dropped in one night at the Globe on the
off-chance that she might have come back and got herself reinstated in
the Number One company, which was still doing a prosperous business.

He didn't expect to find her there; hardly hoped to. A somewhat better
chance was that he might find Alec McEwen in the lobby, and that if
little Alec were properly primed with alcohol and led to a discussion of
the collapse of the road company, he might volunteer some scrap of
information about her.

Little Alec was found in the lobby, right enough, and properly primed in
the bar next door, and he described very vigorously, the disgust of
Block's brother-in-law over the lemon the astute partners had sold him;
for real money, too. But not a word did little Alec offer about Rose.

It was Jimmy's practise to make two professional visits to New York
every year; one in the autumn, one in the spring, in order that he might
have interesting matters to write about when the local theatrical doings
had been exhausted.

On his first trip after Rose's disappearance, he went faithfully to
every musical show in New York, and