They walked down to the street entrance in silence.  There Jimmy, with a nonchalance that rang a little flat on his own ear, pulled up and said: 

“Look here!  There’s no need your trailing around on this job.  Tell me where you will be in an hour and I’ll call you up.”

“Oh, I’ve nothing else to do,” said Rodney, “and I’ll be glad to go along.”

They were at cross-purposes here.  Jimmy didn’t want him along.  He had a hunch that Rodney wouldn’t find little Alec very satisfactory, but he didn’t know just how to say so.  Rodney, on his part, strongly disrelished the notion of trailing the press agent from bar to bar.  But he attributed the same distaste to Jimmy and felt it wouldn’t be fair not to share it with him.  There was, besides, a certain satisfaction in making his pride do penance.

Jimmy hadn’t overestimated his knowledge of little Alec McEwen’s orbit.  They walked together to the corner of Clark and Randolph Streets and, working radially from there, in the third bar they found him.

Even before this, however, Rodney regretted that he hadn’t let Jimmy do the job alone.  He was not an habitue of the sumptuous bars of the Loop, and the voices of the men he found in them, the sort of men they were, and the sort of things they talked about found raw nerves all over him.  On another errand, he realized, he wouldn’t have minded.  But it seemed as if Rose herself were somehow soiled by the necessity of visiting places like this in search of information about her.

The feeling he had come back with from that down-state town to which he had fled, that she was in a miry pit from which, at any cost, she must be saved, had been a good deal weakened during the ten days that had intervened since then.  Her having sent back that hundred dollars; what Portia had said about her courage; Harriet’s notion that a stage career, if properly managed, was something one could at least pretend not to be ashamed of; and, most lately, what Jimmy Wallace had said about the New York director who thought she had a future—­all these things had contributed to the result.

But this pursuit, from one drinking bar to another, of the only man who could tell him where she was, was bringing the old feeling back in waves.

“Here we are,” said Jimmy, as they entered the third place.  It was a cramped cluttered room, thick with highly varnished, carved woodwork and upholstered leather.  Its principal ornament was a nude Bouguereau in a red-draped alcove, heavily overlighted and fearfully framed; the sort of picture any one would have yawned at in a gallery, it acquired here, from the hard-working indecency of its intent, a weak salaciousness.

Rodney found himself being led up to a group in the far corner of the bar, and guessed rightly that the young man with the high voice and the seemingly permanent smile, who greeted Jimmy with a determined facetiousness, “Hello, old Top!  Drunk again?” was the man they sought.