“I don’t believe,” said Rose, “that you could get better ready-made costumes a lot cheaper; at least, not enough to go around, and in a hurry.  Of course every now and then, you can pick up a tremendous bargain—­some imported model that’s a little extreme, or made in trying colors, that they want to get rid of and will sell almost for whatever you’ll pay.  But the two or three we might be able to find, wouldn’t help us much.”

“And I suppose,” he said dubiously, “it’s out of the question getting them any other way than ready-made; that is, and cheaper too.”

The only sign of excitement there was in the girl’s voice when she answered, was a sort of exaggerated matter-of-factness.  Oh, yes, there was besides a wire edge on it, so that the words came to him through the cold air with a kind of ringing distinctness.

“I could design the costumes and pick out the materials,” she said, “but we’d have to get a good sewing woman—­perhaps more than one, to get them done.”

He wasn’t greatly surprised.  Perhaps the notion that she might suggest something of the sort was responsible for the tentative dubious way in which he had said he supposed it couldn’t be done.

But Rose, at the sound of her own voice and the extraordinary proposition it was uttering, was astonished clear through.  She hadn’t had the remotest idea of saying such a thing a moment or two before.  What had suggested it, she couldn’t have told.  That day-dream perhaps, that she had amused herself with while Mrs. Goldsmith was making up the tale of her atrocities.  Perhaps it had been just the suggestions speaking in the tone, not the words, of John Galbraith’s voice—­that he hoped she’d offer something like that.

Anyway, whatever it was that presented the idea to her, the thing that seized on it and spoke it aloud was an instinct that didn’t need to stop and think—­an instinct that realized indeed, if this isn’t too far-fetched a way of putting it, that its only chance lay in escaping into the open ahead of the slower-footed processes of thought.  If she hadn’t spoken instantly like that, it’s perfectly clear she wouldn’t have spoken at all.  But, having heard her own voice say the words, she resolved, in spite of her fright—­because she was frightened—­to back them up.

“You’ve had—­experience in designing gowns, have you?” Galbraith asked.

“Only for myself,” she admitted.  “But I know I can do that part of it.”

And she wasn’t telling more than the truth!  The confident excitement that possessed her, gave a stronger assurance than any amount of experience could have done.

“But,”—­she reverted to the other part of the plan—­“I’m not a good sewer.  I’d have to have somebody awfully good, who’d do exactly what I told her.”

“Oh, that can be managed;” he said a little absently, and with what struck Rose as a mere man’s ignorance of the difficulties of the situation.  Expert sewing women didn’t grow on every bush.  But at the end of a silence that lasted while they walked a whole block, he convinced her that she had been mistaken.