It was now after eight o’clock.  Rehearsal was at eight-thirty and she had had nothing to eat since noon.  But she stole the time, nevertheless, to tear the wrappings off her “form” and gaze on its respectable nakedness for two or three minutes with a contemplative eye.  Then, reluctantly—­it was the first time she had left that room with reluctance—­she turned out the light and hurried off to the little lunch-room that lay on the way to the dance-hall.

She never again, in the active practise of her profession, knew anything quite like the ensuing seventy-two hours.  Every stimulus was, of course, abnormally heightened.  There was the novelty, the thrilling sense of adventure that missed being fear only through an inexplicable confidence of success.  And then, anyway, her imagination was a virgin field that had never been cropped, and the luxurious fertility of it was amazing.

It was during that first rehearsal, which she so narrowly missed being late for, that she got the general schemes for both sets of costumes.  That there must be a general scheme she had decided at once.  The sextette was a unit; none of the members of it ever appeared without the others, and it would be immensely more effective, she perceived, if this fact were expressed somehow in the costumes.  Not by means of a stupid uniformity, of course.  The effect she wanted was subtler than that.  But if each one of the six costumes that these girls first appeared in could be made somehow to express the same thing in a different way—­not only in different, though harmonious, colors, but in different, though related, forms—­the effect produced by the six of them together would be immensely greater than the sum of their individual effects.

This, of course, wasn’t what Rose said to herself.  She just wanted a scheme, and with ridiculous ease, she got it.  She didn’t even get it.  There it was staring at her.  And the other scheme for the evening frocks was knocking at the door, too, eager to get in the moment she could give it a chance.  She began studying the girls for their individual peculiarities of style.  Each one of the costumes she made was going to be for a particular girl, suited, without losing its place in the general plan, to the enhancement of her special approximation to beauty.

At last, when a shout from Galbraith aroused her to the fact that she had missed an entrance cue altogether, in her entranced absorption in these visions of hers, and had caused that unpardonable thing, a stage wait, she resolutely clamped down the lid upon her imagination and, until they were dismissed, devoted herself to the rehearsal.

But the pressure kept mounting higher and higher and she found herself furiously impatient to get away, back to her own private wonderland, the squalid little room down the street, that had three bolts of cambric in it and a dressmaker’s manikin—­the raw materials for her magic!