never they were
together--almost unaltered, for two whole days.

It was his manner, she felt sure, that had created it; and yet, so
prompt and automatic had been her response that she couldn't be sure,
not for the first half-hour or so, anyway, that he wasn't attributing it
to her. It wasn't so much the first words he said, when, opening her
door, she saw him standing in the hallway, as it was his attitude; his
rather formal attitude; the way he held his hat; the fact--this was
absurd, of course, but she reconstructed the memory very clearly
afterward--that his clothes were freshly pressed. It was the slightly
anxious, very determined attitude of an estimable and rather shy young
man making his first call on a young lady, on whom he is desperately
desirous of making a favorable impression.

What he said was something not very coherent about being very glad and
its being very good of her, and almost simultaneously she gasped out
that she was glad, and wouldn't he come in. She held out her hand to
him, politely, and he, compensating for an imperceptible hesitation with
a kind of clumsy haste, took it and released it almost as hastily. She
showed him where to hang his coat and hat, conducted him into her
sitting-room and invited him to sit down. And there they were.

And he was Rodney, and she was Rose! It was like an absurd dream.

For a while she talked desperately, under the same sort of delirious
conviction one has in dreams that if he desists one moment from some
grotesquely futile form of activity a cosmic disaster will instantly
take place. A moment of silence between them would be, she felt,
something unthinkably terrible. It was not a fear of what might emerge
from such a silence, the sudden rending of veils and the confrontation
of two realities; it was a dread, purely, of the silence itself. But the
feeling did not last very long.

"Won't you smoke?" she asked suddenly; and hurried on when he hesitated,
"I don't do it myself, but most of my friends do, and I keep the
things." From a drawer in her writing-desk she produced a tin box of
cigarettes. "They're your kind--unless you've changed," she commented,
and went over to the mantel shelf for an ash-tray and a match-safe. The
match-safe was empty and she left the room to get a fresh supply from
her kitchenette.

On the inner face of her front door was a big mirror, and in it, as she
came back through the unlighted passage, she saw her husband. He was
sitti