They went back into the study.

“Clever beasts, though—­poodles,” he remarked, as he nodded Rodney to his chair and poured himself another drink.  “Learn their tricks very nicely.  But good Heavens, Aldrich, think of him as a man!  Think what our American married women are up against, when they want somebody to play off against their husbands and have to fall back on tired little beasts like that.  In all the older countries there are plenty of men, real men who’ve got something, that a married woman can fall back on.  But think of a woman of Eleanor’s attractions having to take up a thing like that.  There’s nothing else for her.  Would you come around and hold her hand and make love to her, or any other man like you?  Not once in a thousand times.  Eleanor doesn’t mean anything.  She’s trying to make me jealous.  That’s her newest experiment.  But it’s downright pitiful, I say.”

Rodney got up out of his chair.  It wasn’t a possible conversation.

“I’ll be running along, I think,” he said.  “I’ve a lot of proof to correct to-night, and you’ve got work of your own, I expect.”

“Sit down again,” said Randolph sharply.  “I’m just getting drunk.  But that can wait.  I’m going to talk.  I’ve got to talk.  And if you go, I swear I’ll call up Eleanor’s butler and talk to him.  You’ll keep it to yourself, anyway.”

He added, as Rodney hesitated, “I want to tell you about Rose.  I saw her in New York, you know.”

Rodney sat down again.  “Yes,” he said, “so she wrote.  Tell me how she looked.  She’s been working tremendously hard, and I’m a little afraid she’s overdoing it.”

“She looks,” Randolph said very deliberately, “a thousand years old.”  He laughed at the sharp contraction of Rodney’s brows.  “Oh, not like that!  She’s as beautiful as ever.  More.  Facial planes just a hair’s breadth more defined perhaps—­a bit more of what that painter Burton calls edge.  But not a line, not a mark.  Her skin’s still got that bloom on it, and she still flushes up when she smiles.  She’s lost five pounds, perhaps, but that’s just condition.  And vitality!  My God!—­But a thousand years old just the same.”

“I’d like to know what you mean by that,” said Rodney.  He added, “if you mean anything,” but the words were unspoken.

Randolph did mean something.

“Why, look here,” he said.  “You know what a kid she was when you married her.  Schoolgirl!  I used to tell her things and she’d listen, all eyes—­holding her breath!  Until I felt almost as wise as she thought I was.  She was always game, even then.  If she started a thing, she saw it through.  If she said, ‘Tell it to me straight,’ why she took it, whatever it might be, standing up.  She wasn’t afraid of anything.  Courage of innocence.  Because she didn’t know.

“Well, she’s courageous now, because she knows.  She’s been through it all and beaten it all, and she knows she can beat it again.  She understands—­I tell you—­everything.