He said he would be immensely interested to see the place, and from the cadence of his voice was apparently prepared to let the conversation end there. But she prolonged it a little.
"Do you hear from—Chicago while you're down here, Roddy?" she asked. "Whether everything's all right—at home, I mean?"
It was a second or two before he answered, but when he did, his voice was perfectly steady.
"Yes," he said. "I get a night-letter every morning from Miss French. (This was Mrs. Ruston's successor.) It's—everything's all right."
"Good-by, then, till noon," she said. And if he could have seen the smile that was on her lips, and the brightness that was in her eyes as she said it ...!
It was a part, you see, of his Quixotic determination to make no claims, that he had not said a word, during his evening call, about the twins—her babies!
On the stroke of twelve his card was brought to her, and she went out into their bare little waiting-room to meet him.
"We aren't a regular dressmaking establishment, you see," she said. "The people we have to impress aren't the ones we make the clothes for. So we can be as shabby down here as we please, and Alice says—Alice Perosini, you know—that our shabbiness really does impress them. Shows we don't care what they think.
"You're sure you've plenty of time to see around in?" she went on. "That it won't cut into your time for lunch?"
He made it plain that he had plenty of time, and she took him into her own studio, a big north-lighted room at the back of the building, with the painter's manikins that Jimmy Wallace had told about, standing about in it, and some queer-looking electric-light fixtures suggestive of the stage; a big tin-lined box with half a dozen powerful tungsten lamps in it, and grooves in the mouth of it for the reception of colored slides. And a sort of search-light that swung on a pivot. There was a high cutting-table with a deep indentation in it, in which Rose could stand with her work all around her. On a shelf in a corner he noticed two or three little figures twelve inches high or so that he'd have thought of as dolls had it not been that their small heads gave them the scale of adults. Rose followed his glance.