dissected and discussed, he'd
still have wanted to keep away from James Randolph.

But Rose's letter put a different face on the matter. He felt perfectly
sure that Randolph hadn't been analyzing her during that spare half-hour
at the Knickerbocker. The shoe, it appeared, had been on the other foot.
The fact that she'd put him, partly at least, in possession of what she
had observed and what she guessed, gave him a sort of shield against the
doctor. He told himself that his principal reason for going was to get a
little bit more information about Rose than her letters provided him
with. But the anticipation he dwelt on with the greatest pleasure,
really, was of saying, "Oh, yes. Rose wrote that she'd seen you."

So one evening, after keeping up the pretense through his solitary
dinner and the cigar that followed it, that he meant presently to go up
to his study and correct galley proofs on an enormous brief, he slipped
out about nine o'clock, and walked around to the Randolphs' new house.

This latest venture of Eleanor's had attracted a good deal of comment
among her friends. Somebody called it, with a rather cruel _double
entendre_, Bertie Willis' last word. In the obvious sense of the phrase,
this was true. Eleanor had given him a free hand, and he had gone his
limit. He'd been working slowly backward from Jacobean, through Tudor.
But this thing was perfect Perpendicular. You could, as John Williamson
said, kid yourself into the notion, when you walked under the
keel-shaped arch to their main doorway, that you were going to church.
And the style was carried out with inexorable rigor, down to the most
minute details. But since everybody knew that the latest thing, the
inevitably coming thing, was the pure unadulterated ugliness of
Georgian, a style that Bertie had opposed venomously (because he
couldn't build it, the uncharitable said); and because even Bertie's
carefully preserved youth was felt to have gone a little stale and it
was no longer fashionable to consider his charms irresistible, the
phrase, "his last word," was instantly understood, as I said, to have a
secondary sense.

No one, of course, could tell Eleanor anything about what the coming
styles were going to be, in architecture or anything else. She was one
of these persons with simply a sixth sense for fashions, and her having
gone to Bertie Willis, instead of to young Mellish of the historic New
York firm, McCleod, Hill, Stone & Black, who was doi