friendliness,
quite cool, but wonderfully firm. She was frankly jubilant over the
success of her costumes in _Come On In_ and she enclosed with her letter
a complete set of newspaper reviews of the piece. They reached him a day
or two before Jimmy Wallace telephoned, and this fact perhaps had
something to do with the gruff good humor with which he told Jimmy to go
as far as he liked in his newspaper paragraph.

It was a week later that she wrote:

"I met James Randolph coming up Broadway yesterday afternoon, about five
o'clock. I had a spare half-hour and he said he had nothing else but
spare half-hours; that was what he'd come to New York for. So we turned
into the Knickerbocker and had tea. He's changed, somehow, since I saw
him last; as brilliant as ever, but rather--lurid. Do you suppose things
are going badly between him and Eleanor? I'd hate to think that, but I
shouldn't be surprised. He spoke of calling me up again, but this
morning, instead, I got a note from him saying he was going back to
Chicago. He told me he hadn't seen you forever. Why don't you drop in on
him?"

* * * * *

It was quite true that Rodney had seen very little of the Randolphs
since Rose went away. His liking for James had always been an affair of
the intelligence. The doctor's mind, with its powers of dissecting and
coordinating the phenomena of every-day life, its luminous flashes, its
readiness to go all the way through to the most startling conclusions,
had always so stimulated and attracted his own, that he'd never stopped
to ask whether or not he liked the rest of the man that lay below the
intelligence.

When it came to confronting his friends, in the knowledge that they knew
that Rose had left him for the Globe chorus, he found that James
Randolph was one he didn't care to face. He knew too damned much. He'd
be too infernally curious; too full of surmises, eager for experiments.

The Rodney of a year before, intact, unscarred, without, he'd have said,
a joint in his harness, could afford to enjoy with no more than a
deprecatory grin, the doctor's outrageous and remorseless way of pinning
out on his mental dissecting board, anything that came his way. The
Rodney who came back from Dubuque couldn't grin. He knew too much of the
intimate agony that produced those interesting lesions and
abnormalities. Even in the security, if it could have been had, that his
own situation wouldn't be scientifically