It was a good diagnosis.  And his irritation had, for him, a most unusual cause.  Chorus-girls, principals, owners, authors, costumers, were frequently the objects of his exasperated dissatisfaction.  But to-night the person he was out of all patience with was himself.  He couldn’t make up his mind what he wanted to do.  Or rather, knowing what he wanted to do, he couldn’t make up his mind to do it.  It was this indecision of his that had produced the silence while he and Rose had stood in the entrance to Lessing’s store.  The only resolution he had come to there had been not to allow her to say good night to him and walk away.  But now that she was striding along beside him, he couldn’t make up his mind what to say to her.

A more self-conscious man would have forgiven himself his indecision from recognizing the real complexities of the case.  He was, to begin with, an artist—­almost a great artist.  And a universal characteristic of such is a complete detachment from the materials in which they work—­a sort of remorselessness in the use of anything that can contribute to their complete expression.  The raw materials of John Galbraith’s art were paint and canvas, fabrics, tunes, men and women.  It was an axiom in his experience, that any personal feeling—­any sort of human relation with one of the units in the mosaic he was building—­was to be avoided like the plague.  His professional and personal contempt for a colleague capable of a love-affair with a woman in a company he was directing, would be inexpressible—­unfathomable.  Of course when a man’s job was finished—­and this sort of job nearly always did finish on the opening night—­why, after that, his affairs were his own affair.

In a word:  he ordered his life on the perfectly sound masculine instinct for keeping his work and his sex emotions in separate water-tight compartments.  Rose was a working member of his production, and it was therefore flagrantly impossible that his relation with her should be other than purely professional.

And yet there had been something intangibly personal from the very first, about every one of their broken momentary conversations—­almost about every meeting of their eyes.  It had disturbed him the first time he had ever seen her smile.  He remembered the occasion well enough.  She had just finished executing the dance step—­the almost inexcusably vulgar little dance step he had ordered her to do as a condition of getting the job she said she wanted—­had turned on him blazing with indignation; but right in the full blaze of it, at something she must have seen, and understood, in his own face, in deprecation of her own wrath, she had, slowly and widely, smiled.

And then the way she worked for him in rehearsal!  He’d seen girls work hard before—­desperately, frantically hard, under the fear that they weren’t good enough to hold their jobs.  That wasn’t the spirit in which this girl worked.  She seemed possessed by a blazing determination that the results he wanted should he obtained.  It seemed she couldn’t devour his intentions quickly enough, and her little unconscious nod of satisfaction after he had corrected a mistake and she felt sure that now she knew exactly what he wanted, was like nothing in his previous experience.