What the man was struggling for—­it had been his sole reason for detaining her in the first place—­was some sort of opening that would make it seem natural to tell her he hoped her Christmas Day had not been too intolerably unhappy; to shake hands with her and wish her luck—­assure her in one way or another, that she had in him a friend she could bring her troubles to—­any sort of troubles.  He’d made up his mind to do this when the Christmas rehearsal should he over, as long ago as the night of their walk down the avenue.  This resolution had been reinforced by the look he had caught in her face when she came up to rehearsal this afternoon—­a rather misty, luminous, exalted look,—­a little lack of definition about her eyelids suggesting there had been tears there.

This was good observation like her own of him.  But, again like hers, in its failure to get the central clue, it only mislead him, the worse.  If he could have guessed that she had been having a Christmas celebration of her own that day; that there had been unwrapped and displayed, three little presents she had bought the day before; one for her husband, and one for each of her two babies, and that, just before starting for rehearsal, she had wrapped them up and put them into her trunk to await the day when they could be given, it might have altered matters somewhat.

The thing that finally made it clearly impossible for Galbraith to express anything at all of this feeling which he, in good faith, called friendship for her, was her alternative offer—­if he had time, to take him up to her room for a look at the patterns.

If she’s seen him as anything at all but starkly her employer and her financier; if she’s had the faintest glimmer of him as one who held for her any personal feelings whatever, she never would have suggested as an alternative to her bringing the patterns here to rehearsal, his coming up to her room for a look at them.

The thing of all others that irritated Galbraith was the possession of a divided mind.  Just now, disappointed as he was, almost to the point of pain, though he wouldn’t acknowledge to himself that it went as far as that, over the evident fact that his relation to the girl, in spite of their partnership, was exactly what it had been from the beginning, he was still aware that if he’d got the opening he wanted, had managed another of those warm lithe hand-clasps with her, and had got the notion across to her that he wanted her to make a friend of him and a confidant, he’d be going away now, afterward, under the painful misgiving that he was a bit of an old fool.  The product of all this irritation was, however, that he declined Rose’s offer of a view of her patterns rather bruskly.

“It was just curiosity, as I said.  Go along your own way and don’t worry about me.  You will be all right.”

Rose couldn’t feel much conviction behind this expression of confidence, and she went away, as I have said, in a sort of panic.  Was she all wrong, after all?  Couldn’t you design stage costumes except by making pictures of them?  She knew what he meant by water-colored plates.  She’d seen them framed in the lobbies at musical shows she’d been to with Rodney.  That was how costume designers worked, was it?  Well she knew she never could do anything like that.