First floor—­second—­third—­fourth.  Whew!  And there you are in Josie Fifer’s kingdom—­a great front room, unexpectedly bright and even cosy with its whir of sewing machines:  tables, and tables, and tables, piled with orderly stacks of every sort of clothing, from shoes to hats, from gloves to parasols; and in the room beyond this, and beyond that, and again beyond that, row after row of high wooden cabinets stretching the width of the room, and forming innumerable aisles.  All of Bluebeard’s wives could have been tucked away in one corner of the remotest and least of these, and no one the wiser.  All grimly shut and locked, they are, with the key in Josie’s pocket.  But when, at the behest of McCabe, or sometimes even Sid Hahn himself, she unlocked and opened one of these doors, what treasures hung revealed!  What shimmer and sparkle and perfume—­and moth balls!  The long-tailed electric light bulb held high in one hand, Josie would stand at the door like a priestess before her altar.

There they swung, the ghosts and the skeletons, side by side.  You remember that slinking black satin snakelike sheath that Gita Morini wore in “Little Eyolf”?  There it dangles, limp, invertebrate, yet how eloquent!  No other woman in the world could have worn that gown, with its unbroken line from throat to hem, its smooth, high, black satin collar, its writhing tail that went slip-slip-slipping after her.  In it she had looked like a sleek and wicked python that had fasted for a long, long time.

Dresses there are that have made stage history.  Surely you remember the beruffled, rose-strewn confection in which the beautiful Elsa Marriott swam into our ken in “Mississipp’”?  She used to say, wistfully, that she always got a hand on her entrance in that dress.  It was due to the sheer shock of delight that thrilled audience after audience as it beheld her loveliness enhanced by this floating, diaphanous tulle cloud.  There it hangs, time-yellowed, its pristine freshness vanished quite, yet as fragrant with romance as is the sere and withered blossom of a dead white rose pressed within the leaves of a book of love poems.  Just next it, incongruously enough, flaunt the wicked froufrou skirts and the low-cut bodice and the wasp waist of the abbreviated costume in which Cora Kassell used so generously to display her charms.  A rich and portly society matron of Pittsburgh now—­she whose name had been a synonym for pulchritude these thirty years; she who had had more cold creams, hats, cigars, corsets, horses, and lotions named for her than any woman in history!  Her ample girth would have wrought sad havoc with that eighteen-inch waist now.  Gone are the chaste curves of the slim white silk legs that used to kick so lithely from the swirl of lace and chiffon.  Yet there it hangs, pertly pathetic, mute evidence of her vanished youth, her delectable beauty, and her unblushing confidence in those same.