Dinner was a miserable affair. The constraint between them was like a wall of fog. It was perhaps fortunate that they had decided to go to Giuseppe's, for there conversation is not essential. What with the clatter of cutlery, the babel of talk, the shrill cries of the Italian waitresses conveying instruction and reproof to an unseen cook, who replied with what sounded like a recitative passage from grand opera, and the deep gurgling of the soup dispatchers, there is plenty of tumult to cover any lack of small talk.
Rosie, listening to the uproar, with the chair of the diner behind her joggling her back and the elbow of the diner beside her threatening her ribs, remembered with bitterness that George had called the McAstor a noisy crowded place.
When the ice cream and the demi-tasses appeared Rosie leaned forward.
'Did you get tickets for a theater?' she asked.
'No,' said George; 'I thought I'd wait and see what show you'd like to go to.'
'I don't think I want to go to a show. I've got a headache. I'll go home and rest.'
'Good idea!' said George. It was hopeless for him to try to keep the relief out of his voice. 'I'm sorry you've got a headache.'
Rosie said nothing.
They parted at her door in strained silence. Rosie went wearily up to her room and sat down on the accommodating piece of furniture that was a bed by night and by day retired modestly into the wall and tried to look like a bookshelf. She had deceived George when she told him she had a headache. Her head had never been clearer. Never had she been able to think so coherently and with such judicial intensity. She could see quite plainly now how mistaken she had been in George. She had been deceived by the glamour of the man. She did not blame herself for this. Any girl might have done the same.
Even now, though her eyes were opened, she freely recognized his attractions. He was good-looking, an entertaining talker, and superficially kind and thoughtful. She was not to be blamed for having fancied herself in love with him; she ought to consider herself very lucky to have found him out before it was too late. She had been granted the chance of catching him off his guard, of scratching the veneer, and she felt thankful. . . . At this point in her meditations Rosie burst into tears—due, no doubt, to relief.
The drawback to being a girl who seldom cries is that when you do cry you do it clumsily and without restraint. Rosie was subconsciously aware that she was weeping a little noisily; but it was not till a voice spoke at her side that she discovered she was rousing the house.
'For the love of Pete, honey, whatever is the matter?'
A stout, comfortably unkempt girl in a pink kimono was standing beside her. There was concern in her pleasant face.
'It's nothing,' said Rosie. 'I didn't mean to disturb you.'
'Nothing! It sounded like a coupla families being murdered in cold blood. I'm in the room next to this; and I guess the walls in this joint are made of paper, for it sounded to me as if it was all happening on my own rug. Come along, honey! You can tell me all about it. Maybe it's not true, anyway.'
She sat down beside Rosie on the bookcase bed and patted her shoulder in a comforting manner. Then she drew from the recesses of her kimono a packet of chewing gum, a girl's best friend.
'Have some?'
Rosie shook her head.
'Kind o' soothing, gum is,' said the stout girl, inserting a slab into her mouth as if she were posting a letter, and beginning to champ rhythmically, like an amiable cow. 'Now what's your little trouble?'
'There's nothing to tell.'
'Well, go ahead and tell it, then.'
Rosie gave in to the impulse that urged her to confide. There was something undeniably appealing and maternal about this girl. In a few broken sentences she revealed the position of affairs. When she came to the part where George had refused to take her into the McAstor the stout girl was so moved that she swallowed her gum and had to take another slab.
The stout girl gave it as her opinion that George was a cootie.
'Of course,' said Rosie with a weak impulse to defend her late idol, 'he's very particular about clothes.'
The stout girl would hear no defense. She said it was Bolsheviki like George who caused half the trouble in the world. It began to look to her as if George Mellon was one of these here now lounge lizards that you read pieces about in the papers.
'Not,' she said, eying Rosie critically, 'but what that certainly is some little suit you've got on. I'll say so! Nobody couldn't look her best in that.' She gave a sudden start. 'Say, where did you get it?'
'At Fuller Benjamin's.'
'No!' cried the stout girl. 'But it is! I thought all along it looked kind o' familiar. Why, honey, that's the suit we girls call the Crown Prince, because it oughtn't to be at large! Why, it's a regular joke with us! I've tried to sell it a dozen times myself. What? Sure I work at Fuller Benjamin's. And—say, I remember you now. You came in just on closing time and Sadie Lewis waited on you. For the love o' Pete, why ever did you go and be so foolish as to let Sadie wish a quince like that on you?'
'She looked so tired,' said Rosie miserably, 'I just hated to bother her to show me a lot of suits; so I took the first. It seemed such a shame. She looked all worn out.'
For the first time in her career as a chewer, a career that had covered two decades, the stout girl swallowed her gum twice in a single evening. Only the supremest emotion could have made her do this, for she was a girl who was careful of her chewing gum, even to the extent of parking it under the counter or behind doors for future use when it was not in active service.
When she bought gum she bought the serial rights. But now, in the face of this extraordinary revelation,
