Of all the persons directly, or even remotely, affected by this nerve-shattering confusion, Rose was perhaps the least perturbed.  The only thing that really mattered to her, was the successful execution of those twelve costumes.  The phantasmagoria at North End Hall was a regrettable, but necessary, interruption of her more important activities.  The interruption didn’t interfere so seriously as at first she thought it would.  The routine of rehearsal as Galbraith developed it, began with special scenes—­isolated bits that needed modification or polishing.  The general rehearsals, taking this act or that and going through with it from beginning to end, and involving, of course, the presence of everybody in the company, didn’t, as a rule, begin till three in the afternoon; sometimes till as late as five.  Of course when they did begin, they lasted until all hours.

But the labors of the chorus, and even of the sextette, shrank very much in proportion to the work of the principals.  Nearly all the changes that were made were in the direction of compressing the chorus and giving the principals more room.  So that for long stretches of time, during which, dressed in her working clothes and curled up in one of the remoter of the cushioned window-seats, but ready to answer a summons to the stage as promptly as a fireman, she could let her mind run without interruption on the solution of some of her own problems, and then be ready when she went back to her room, to fall into bed and asleep (the two acts had become practically simultaneous) secure in the possession of a clearly thought out program for the morrow.

She wakened automatically at half past seven and was down-town by half past eight, to do whatever shopping the work of the previous day revealed the need of.  The fact that it was, for the greater part, John Galbraith’s money she was spending (she had managed to put in a little herself by calculating down to a fine point the necessary margin for existence) worked to her advantage in these operations.  She could not, but for that fact, have forced herself to hunt down bargains so persistently nor to keep the incidental expense for findings and such, so low.

At nine-thirty in the morning—­an unheard of hour in the theater—­the watchman at the Globe let her in the stage door, and Rose had half an hour before the arrival of the wardrobe mistress and her assistant, for looking over the work done since she had left for rehearsal the day before.

She liked this quiet, cavernous old barn of a place down under the Globe stage; liked it when she had it to herself before the two sewing women came and later, when, with a couple of sheets spread down on the floor she cut and basted according to her cambric patterns, keeping ahead of the flying needles of the other two.  After her own little room, the mere spaciousness of it seemed almost noble.  She even liked it, when, about half past one in the afternoon, on matinee days, the chorus-girls of the show now