Part 25

"Have you thought of how I'm not a lady? Not what you'd call a lady?"

There was no answer to that, and so he kissed her.

"And how you'd be if you was to marry some one who was a lady? Have you thought of that?"

"I have."

"Well then, it's this way. If you was a rich man I wouldn't marry you." She paused.

"But you will, because I'm a poor one?"

"Yes."

"Thank God I'm poor."

He drew her to him and she yielded, not wholly, but with a shrinking of her small body, and a soft, shy surrender of her lips.

She was thinking, "If he married a lady he'd have to spend ten times on her what he need on me."

All she said was, "There are things I can do for you that a lady couldn't."

"Oh--don't--don't!" he cried. That was the one way she hurt him.

"What are you going to do with me now?" said she.

"I'm going to take you for a walk. We can't stay here."

"Can you wait?"

"I have waited."

She ran away and stayed away for what seemed an interminable time. Then somebody opened the door and handed Rose in. Somebody kissed her where she stood in the doorway, and laughed softly, and shut the door upon Rose and Tanqueray.

Rose stood there still. "Do you know me?" said she, and laughed.

Somebody had transformed her, had made her slip her stiff white gown and dressed her in a muslin one with a belt that clipped her, showing her pretty waist. Somebody had taught her how to wear a scarf about her shoulders; and somebody had taken off that odious linen collar and bared the white column of her neck.

"She made me put it on," said Rose. "She said if I didn't, I couldn't wear the hat."

Somebody, Rose's mistress, had been in Rose's secret. She knew and understood his great poem of the Hat.

Rose took it out of the band-box and put it on. Impossible to say whether he liked her better with it or without it. He thought without; for she had parted her hair in the middle and braided it at the back.

"Do you like my hair?" said she.

"Why didn't you do it like that before?"

"I don't know. I wanted to. But I didn't."

"Why not?"

Rose hid her face. "I thought," said she, "you'd notice, and think--and think I was after you."

No. He could never say that she had been after him, that she had laid a lure. No huntress she. But she had found him, the hunted, run down and sick in his dark den. And she had stooped there in the darkness, and tended and comforted him.