When Josie rose to leave he eyed her keenly, and pointed to the dragging leg.

“How about that?  Temporary or permanent?”

“Permanent.”

“Oh, fudge!  Who’s telling you that?  These days they can do—­”

“Not with this, though.  That one bone was mashed into about twenty-nine splinters, and when it came to putting ’em together again a couple of pieces were missing.  I must’ve mislaid ’em somewhere.  Anyway, I make a limping exit—­for life.”

“Then no more stage for you—­eh, my girl?”

“No more stage.”

Hahn reached for a pad of paper on the table at his bedside, scrawled a few words on it, signed it “S.H.” in the fashion which became famous, and held the paper out to her.

“When you get out of here,” he said, “you come to New York, and up to my office; see?  Give ’em this at the door.  I’ve got a job for you—­if you want it.”

And that was how Josie Fifer came to take charge of the great Hahn & Lohman storehouse.  It was more than a storehouse.  It was a museum.  It housed the archives of the American stage.  If Hahn & Lohman prided themselves on one thing more than on another, it was the lavish generosity with which they invested a play, from costumes to carpets.  A period play was a period play when they presented it.  You never saw a French clock on a Dutch mantel in a Hahn & Lohman production.  No hybrid hangings marred their back drop.  No matter what the play, the firm provided its furnishings from the star’s slippers to the chandeliers.  Did a play last a year or a week, at the end of its run furniture, hangings, scenery, rugs, gowns, everything, went off in wagonloads to the already crowded storehouse on East Forty-third Street.

Sometimes a play proved so popular that its original costumes, outworn, had to be renewed.  Sometimes the public cried “Thumbs down!” at the opening performance, and would have none of it thereafter.  That meant that costumes sometimes reached Josie Fifer while the wounds of the dressmaker’s needle still bled in them.  And whether for a week or a year fur on a Hahn & Lohman costume was real fur; its satin was silk-backed, its lace real lace.  No paste, or tinsel, or cardboard about H. & L.!  Josie Fifer could recall the scenes in a play, step by step from noting with her keen eye the marks left on costume after costume by the ravages of emotion.  At the end of a play’s run she would hold up a dress for critical inspection, turning it this way and that.

“This is the dress she wore in her big scene at the end of the second act where she crawls on her knees to her wronged husband and pounds on the door and weeps.  She certainly did give it some hard wear.  When Marriott crawls she crawls, and when she bawls she bawls.  I’ll say that for her.  From the looks of this front breadth she must have worn a groove in the stage at the York.”