He called for his check; and while he waited he saw her again, the figure of the woman--not in the restaurant--but in a kind of vision--in the alcove behind the curtain, her head a little bent, her hands folded quietly in her lap... who _was_ she--? His heart gave a sudden twist and stopped--He had never felt like this about--any one--had he? He looked down at a red check, with its stamped black figures, and fumbled in his pocket--and brought out a coin and laid it beside the check and stared at it.... The check and the coin slipped away and he stared at the marble top. Suppose he saw her--again... some time.... Two coins reappeared on the table and he picked them up. Then he put back one and felt for his hat and went out.... The traffic shrieked at him and people jostled him with their elbows and hurried him, and he jostled back and woke up and shook off the queerness and went about his work.... He was forty-one years old and his property was all well invested. It had never occurred to him that he could be different from himself.... He read in the paper of people who did things--did things different from themselves, suddenly--people who squandered fortunes in a day, or murdered and ran away from business--and their wives--people who committed suicide. Vicariously, he knew all about how queer men could be... and his chief experience with it all, with this world that his newspaper rolled before him every day, was a kind of wonder that people would do such things and a knowledge, deeper than faith or conviction, that Eldridge Walcott would never do any of them. He explained such men--if he explained them at all--by saying that they must have a screw loose somewhere. Perhaps he thought of men, vaguely, as put together with works inside, carefully adjusted and screwed in place, warranted, with good usage, to run so long; certainly it had not occurred to him that a man could change much after he was forty years old. He went back to business refreshed, more refreshed than his luncheon often left him. He thought of Rosalind, now and then, with a kind of thankfulness--Rosalind waiting for him at night with the children, life moving on in the same comfortable way. He had even a moment’s flash of thankfulness to the unknown woman that she had made him see how comfortable he was, how much he had to be thankful for in his quiet life. It was a profitable afternoon--the best stroke of business in six months; and he flattered himself that he handled it well. He felt unusually alive, alert. On the way home he passed a florist’s and half stopped, looking down at a beautiful plant that flamed on a bench outside the door; he did not know what it was; they were all “plants” to him, except roses--he knew a rose--this was not a rose; he looked at it a moment and hurried on.... She would think it strange if he brought her anything like a plant.