But the thing ran like another instalment of the talk they had had in Dubuque.  She knew he had been distressed over the shabbiness of her surroundings, knocking about with that road company, and she was afraid that in spite of the assurance she had then given him, he was still worried about her.  She was sure he’d be glad to know that she’d quit the stage for good, as an active performer on it, at least; that she was earning an excellent salary, fifty dollars a week, doing a highly congenial kind of work that had good prospects of advancement in it.  She had a very comfortable little apartment (she gave him the address of it) and was living in a way that—­she had written “even Harriet,” but scratched this out—­Frederica, for example, would consider entirely respectable.  So he needn’t feel another moment’s anxiety about her.  She’d have written sooner, but had wanted to get fully settled in her new job and be sure she was going to be able to keep it, in order that she might have something definitely reassuring to tell him.  And she hoped he and the babies were well.

It was not until hours afterward, when the letter was an indistinguishable fluff of white ash in the fireplace, that it occurred to him that it had no satirical intent whatever and that the purpose of it had been, quite simply, what it had pretended to be; namely, to reassure him and put an end to his anxieties.

As he had read it in the revulsion from that literally sickening hope of his, it had seemed about the most mordant piece of irony that had ever been launched against him.  The assumption of it had seemed to be that he was the most pitiable snob in the world; that all he’d cared for had been that she’d disgraced him by going on the stage.  He’d be glad to know that she was once more “respectable.”

Well—­this was the question which, as I said, he did not ask himself until hours later—­wasn’t she justified in believing that?  Certainly that night, in her little room on North Clark Street, he’d given her reason enough for thinking so.  But later, in Dubuque—­well, hadn’t he quoted Harriet to her?  Hadn’t he offered to help her as a favor to himself, because he couldn’t endure it that she should live like this?  Had he exhibited anything to her at all in their two encounters, but an uncontrolled animal lust and a perfectly contemptible vanity?

He bitterly regretted having destroyed the letter.  But the tone of it, he was sure, except for that well merited jibe about Harriet, which had been erased, was kindly.  Yet he had acted once more, like a spoiled child about it.

Could he write and thank her?  In Dubuque she had asked him not to come back.  Did that prohibition cover writing?  Her letter did not explicitly revoke it.  She asked him no questions.  But he remembered now a post-script, which, at the time of reading, he’d taken merely as a final barb of satire.  “I am still Doris Dane down here, of course,” it had read.  If she hadn’t meant that for a sneering assurance that his precious name wasn’t being taken in vain—­and had he ever heard Rose sneer at anybody?—­what could have been the purpose of it except to make sure that a letter from him wouldn’t come addressed “Rose Aldrich,” and so fail to be delivered to her.