drawing to the end of its run, began dawdling in, passing shrill jokes with Bill Flynn, the fireman, rummaging through the mail in the letter-box, casually unfastening their clothes all the while, preliminary to kimonos and make-up, gathering in little knots about the sewing-machines and exclaiming in profane delight over the costumes.  She wondered at herself, sometimes, for having ceased to mind their language, their shameless way of going half-clad, their general atmosphere of moth-like worthlessness—­and then laughed at herself for wondering!

How would her own quality be finer, her soul a more ample thing, for the keeping, on one of the shelves of it, of a pot of carefully preserved horror?  If she could succeed with these costumes, her success, she hoped, would lead her directly into the business of designing other costumes for the stage.  And if she became a professional stage costumer, this rather loose, ramshackle, down-at-the-heel morality of back-stage musical comedy would be a permanent fact in her life, just as the dustiness of law-books and the stuffiness of court rooms were permanent facts in Rodney’s.

As the work went on, her confidence in the success of this initiatory venture became less ecstatic and more reasonable.  A few of the costumes were finished and, seen on live models (a couple of girls in the chorus in the Globe show had volunteered to try on) were, if Rose knew anything at all about clothes, without doubt or qualification, good.

She had had just one really bad quarter of an hour over them, and that, back on Christmas Day as it happened, was when Galbraith, having detained her after he had dismissed the rehearsal, asked to see her sketches.

“Sketches!” she echoed, perplexed.

“Oh, I don’t mean regular water-colored plates,” he said.  “Just whatever rough drafts of the things you will have put down on paper to start yourself off with.  It’s simple curiosity, you understand.”

“But,” she gasped, “I haven’t put anything down on paper—­not anything at all!  I don’t know how to draw.”

And now he was perplexed in turn.  How could one design a costume without drawing a picture of it?

She explained her working method to him; though not, she felt, very successfully.  She was perhaps a bit flustered, and he didn’t seem to be giving her his complete attention—­seemed to be covering up, with the pretense of listening, a strong interior abstraction.

This was again a good diagnosis as far as it went.  Only it didn’t dig in far enough for even the faintest surmise as to what the nature of his abstraction was.

“I could bring the patterns down here.  Or, if you had time, you could come up to my room and see them.  But I’m afraid you couldn’t tell much from that, because they’re all taken apart, you see, and they’re just in paper cambric and not the right colors.”