It is a tribute to one of the qualities that made John Galbraith a successful director, that Rose spent a miserable half-hour worrying over these selections of the wife of the principal owner of the show, feeling she ought to put up some sort of fight and hardly deterred by the patent futility of such a course.  To rest her esthetic senses from the delirium of fussiness that was giving Mrs. Goldsmith so much pleasure, she began thinking about that Poiret frock—­the superb simple audacity of it!  It had been made by an artist who knew where to stop.  And he had stopped rather incredibly soon.  Just suppose ...  And then her eyes lighted up, gazed thoughtfully out the window across the wind-swept desert of the avenue, and, presently she grinned—­widely, contentedly.

For the next hour and a half, during the intervals of her own trying on, she entertained herself very happily with the day-dream that she herself had a commission to design the costumes for The Girl Up-stairs.  She had always done that more or less, she realized, when she went to musical-comedy shows with Rodney, especially when they were badly costumed.  But this time she did it a good deal more vividly, partly because her interest in the piece was more intense, partly because her imagination had a blank canvas to work on.

All the while, like Sister Anne in the tower, she kept one eye on the door and prayed for the arrival of John Galbraith.

He came in just as Mrs. Goldsmith finished her task—­just when, by a process of studious elimination, every passable thing in the store had been discarded and the twelve most utterly hopeless ones—­two for each girl—­laid aside for purchase.  The girls were despatched to put on the evening frocks first, and were then paraded before the director.

He was a diplomat as I have said (possibly I spoke of him before as an acrobat.  It comes to the same thing), and he was quick on his feet.  Rose, watching his face very closely, thought that for just a split second, she caught a gleam of ineffable horror.  But it was gone so quickly she could almost have believed that she had been mistaken.  He didn’t say much about the costumes, but he said it so promptly and adequately that Mrs. Goldsmith beamed with pride.  She sent the girls away to put on the other set—­the afternoon frocks, and once more the director’s approbation, though laconic, was one hundred per cent. pure.

“That’s all,” he said in sudden dismissal of the sextette.  “Rehearsal at eight-thirty.”

Five of them scurried like children let out of school, around behind the set of screens that made an extemporaneous dressing-room, and began changing in a mad scramble, hoping to get away and to get their dinners eaten soon enough to enable them to see the whole bill at a movie show before the evening’s rehearsal.

But Rose didn’t avail herself of her dismissal—­remained hanging about, a couple of paces away from where Galbraith was talking to Mrs. Goldsmith.  The only question that remained, he was telling her, was whether her selections were not too—­well, too refined, genteel, one might say, for the stage.  Regretfully he confessed he was a little afraid they were.  It needed a certain crudity to withstand the glare of the footlights and until these gowns had been submitted to that glare, one couldn’t be sure.