She held out her hand to
him, politely, and he, compensating for an imperceptible hesitation with
a kind of clumsy haste, took it and released it almost as hastily. She
showed him where to hang his coat and hat, conducted him into her
sitting-room and invited him to sit down. And there they were.
And he was Rodney, and she was Rose! It was like an absurd dream.
For a while she talked desperately, under the same sort of delirious
conviction one has in dreams that if he desists one moment from some
grotesquely futile form of activity a cosmic disaster will instantly
take place. A moment of silence between them would be, she felt,
something unthinkably terrible. It was not a fear of what might emerge
from such a silence, the sudden rending of veils and the confrontation
of two realities; it was a dread, purely, of the silence itself. But the
feeling did not last very long.
"Won't you smoke?" she asked suddenly; and hurried on when he hesitated,
"I don't do it myself, but most of my friends do, and I keep the
things.
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