"Give up your business, you mean?" he asked quickly.
She nodded. "It can't be done out there," she said. "All the big productions that there's any money in are made in New York. I'll come back and just be your wife. I'll keep your house and mother the children, and—what was it you said to Gertrude?—maintain your status, if you don't think I'm spoiled for that."
That last phrase, though, was said with a smile, which he answered with one of his own and threw in in parenthesis, "You ought to hear Violet go on, and Constance." But with an instant return to seriousness, he said:
"I've not asked that, Rose. I wouldn't dream of asking it!"
"I know," she said. "It's a thing I'm glad you let me give—unasked. But I mean it, Roddy. I've meant it from the first, when I told you you were all I wanted. There wasn't any string tied to that."
"I know," he said. "But all the same, it wouldn't work, Rose."
"There's a real job there," she persisted, "just in being successfully the wife of a successful man. I can see that now. I never saw it when it was my job. Hardly caught a glimpse of it. I didn't even see my bills; let you pay them down at the office, with all your own work that you had to do."
"It wasn't me," he said. "It was Miss Beach."
She stared at that and gave a short laugh. "If I'd known that ...!" she said.
Then she came back to the point.