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“At lunch?”

“Everything from grape-fruit to coffee. I didn’t know it could be done in one hour. Believe me, he had those waiters jumping. It takes money. He asked all about you, and ma, and everything. And he kept looking at me and saying, ‘It’s wonderful!’ I said, ‘Isn’t it!’ but I meant the lunch. He wanted me to go driving this afternoon–auto and everything. Kept calling me Rose. It made me kind of mad, and I told him how you look. He said, ‘I suppose so,’ and asked me to go to a show to-night. Listen, did you press my Georgette? And the blue?”

“I’ll iron the waist while you’re eating. I’m not hungry. It only takes a minute. Did you say he was grey?”

“Grey? Oh, you mean–why, just here, and here. Interesting, but not a bit old. And he’s got that money look that makes waiters and doormen and taxi drivers just hump. I don’t want any supper. Just a cup of tea. I haven’t got enough time to dress in, decently, as it is.”

Al, draped in the doorway, removed his cigarette to give greater force to his speech. “Your story interests me strangely, little gell. But there’s a couple of other people that would like to eat, even if you wouldn’t. Come on with that supper, Ro. Nobody staked me to a lunch to-day.”

Rose turned to her stove again. Two carmine spots had leaped suddenly to her cheeks. She served the meal in silence, and ate nothing, but that was not remarkable. For the cook there is little appeal in the meat that she has tended from its moist and bloody entrance in the butcher’s paper, through the basting or broiling stage to its formal appearance on the platter. She saw that Al and her father were served. Then she went back to the kitchen, and the thud of her iron was heard as she deftly fluted the ruffles of the crepe blouse. Floss appeared when the meal was half eaten, her hair shiningly coiffed, the pink ribbons of her corset cover showing under her thin kimono. She poured herself a cup of tea and drank it in little quick, nervous gulps. She looked deliriously young, and fragile and appealing, her delicate slenderness revealed by the flimsy garment she wore. Excitement and anticipation lent a glow to her eyes, colour to her cheeks. Al, glancing expertly at the ingenuousness of her artfully simple coiffure, the slim limpness of her body, her wide-eyed gaze, laughed a wise little laugh.

“Every move a Pickford. And so girlish withal.”

Floss ignored him. “Hurry up with that waist, Rose!”

“I’m on the collar now. In a second.” There was a little silence. Then: “Floss, is–is Henry going to call for you–here?”

“Well, sure! Did you think I was going to meet him on the corner? He said he wanted to see you, or something polite like that.”

She finished her tea and vanished again. Al, too, had disappeared to begin that process from which he had always emerged incredibly sleek, and dapper and perfumed. His progress with shaving brush, shirt, collar and tie was marked by disjointed bars of the newest syncopation whistled with an uncanny precision and fidelity to detail. He caught the broken time, and tossed it lightly up again, and dropped it, and caught it deftly like a juggler playing with frail crystal globes that seem forever on the point of crashing to the ground.

Pa stood up, yawning. “Well,” he said, his manner very casual, “guess I’ll just drop around to the movie.”

From the kitchen, “Don’t you want to sit with ma a minute, first?”

“I will when I come back. They’re showing the third installment of ‘The Adventures of Aline,’ and I don’t want to come in in the middle of it.”

He knew the selfishness of it, this furtive and sprightly old man. And because he knew it he attempted to hide his guilt under a burst of temper.