that she would look awful in it. She had opened her lips to denounce and reject the horrid thing when she caught sight of the girl's face.
Girls who live alone and support themselves, like Rosie, come to acquire something of the masculine attitude towards life. They lose the woman's inborn gift of shopping and acquire in its place that consideration for the other party to the transaction which marks the average male. A man whose aim it is to buy a pair of trousers does not stand coolly by while the attendant exhibits his entire stock and then go off without making a purchase. A brief 'Gimme those!' and his shopping is finished.
Rosie had this male characteristic. She hated giving trouble. Even in ordinary circumstances it pained her to have to refuse to buy. And now, looking at this pale tired girl before her, she forgot all about the vital importance of finding the one spring suit heaven had destined for her from the beginning of things. All she felt was that she must get the business finished quickly and let the poor girl go home.
'That will do splendidly,' she said.
The salesgirl blinked. This was one of the things that didn't happen. Then, as realization came to her, her eyes lit up. Their grateful gleam was Rosie's recompense. And she needed some recompense, for directly the words were out of her mouth she knew what she had done.
The memory of a kind action is supposed to be an unfailing receipe for happiness. Boy Scouts grow fat on it. But Rosie, as she went to meet George at the Hotel McAstor on the night of his birthday, felt none of that glow of quiet content she might reasonably have expected as her right. On the contrary, she was miserable and apprehensive. Man—which includes woman—being the ruler of creation and having an immortal soul and other advantages, ought to be superior to such trivalities as clothes.
A quiet conscience is more important than a loud suit. But such is human frailty that the best of us lose our nerve if we feel that our outer husk is not all it should be. Rosie knew that she did not look right! And when a woman feels that, she might just as well go home and get into a kimono.
The situation was rendered more poignant by the fact that George was not as other men. George was employed at the offices of a magazine that dictated the fashions to a million women; where even the stenographers looked like fashion plates and every caller presented to his gaze the last word in what was smart.
George, therefore, naturally had a high standard. Something special was required to win his trained approval. And she was coming to meet him at a fashionable restaurant in a black-and-white check suit that was not only hideous but hardly respectable.
It was just the sort of suit that girls wore to whom strange men on street corners said: 'Hello, kiddo!' It was a flashy, giggling, sideways-glancing, chorus-of-a-burlesque-show sort of suit. It was the outer covering of a cutie and a baby doll.
As she got off the car she saw him waiting outside the restaurant. He looked superb. George was always a great dresser. He was tall and slim, and resembled those divine youths you see in tailors' advertisements, who stand with bulging bosoms and ingrowing waists, saying to their college chums, as they light a cigarette: 'Yes, my dear chap, I always buy the Kute-kut Klothes, each suit guaranteed for one year on the easy-payment system. A fellow must look decent!'
She hurried toward him with a sinking heart, gamely forcing her face into a smile.
'Here I am, dear!'
'Hello!' said George.
Was his voice cold? Was his manner distant?
'Many happy returns of the day!'
'Thanks!'
Yes. His voice was cold. His manner was distant. And a dull disapproving look was in his eyes.
There was a momentary silence. They stood aside to allow a stream of diners to go in. Rosie looked at the women. They were walking reproaches to her. They were smart. They glittered. A sudden panic came upon her. Something told her that George would be ashamed to be seen with her in a place like the McAstor.
'I say, Rosie!'
There was embarrassment in George's voice. He gave a swift look over his shoulder into the crowded prismatic lobby of the restaurant.
'I don't know that I'm so crazy to have dinner here,' he said awkwardly. 'How about going somewhere else?'
The blow had fallen. And, like most blows that fall after we have been anticipating them, it had an unexpected effect on its victim. A moment before she had felt humble, ashamed of herself. But now, when George had come out into the open and as good as told her in so many words that he shrank from being seen with her in public, a fighting spirit she had never suspected herself of possessing flamed into being. All her unhappiness crystallized into a furious resentment. She hated George, who had humiliated her.
'I don't mind,' she said.
'Darned noisy crowded place,' said George. 'I've heard the service is bad too.'
She despised him now, besides hating him. It was pitiful to see him standing there, mumbling transparent lies to try to justify himself.
'Shall we go to Giuseppe's?' she asked coldly.
The question was a test. Giuseppe's was where they always went, one of the four hundred and eighty-seven Italian restaurants in the neighborhood of Times Square which provided sixty-cent table-d'hote dinners for the impecunious. The food was plentiful, especially the soup, which was a meal in itself, and they had always enjoyed themselves there; but if George could countenance the humble surroundings of Giuseppe's on his birthday, on the night they had been looking forward to for weeks as a grand occasion, then George must indeed have sunk low. For George to answer 'Yes' was equivalent to an admission that he had feet of clay.
'Yes,' answered George; 'that's just what I'd like.'
Rosie put her finger in her mouth and bit it hard. It was the only way she could keep from crying.
