“You’re quite right about it,” said Jimmy.  “We men are sentimentalists, as long as things don’t come home.  But when they do, we’re as uncomfortable about penitents as anybody, and we give them as wide a berth.”

“You’re my friend, Jimmy,” she said.  “There’s dinner!  But you won’t be allowed to eat.  You’ll have to begin at the beginning and tell us all about her!  Though I don’t see,” she went on, “how you can know very much more than you put in the paper, if you didn’t even find out where she lived.”

Jimmy, his effect produced, his long meditated vengeance completed by the flare of color he’d seen come up in Violet’s cheeks, settled down seriously to the telling of his tale, stopping occasionally to bolt a little food just before his plate was snatched away from him, but otherwise without intermission.

He’d suspected nothing about the costumes on that opening night of Come On In, until a realization of how amazingly good they were, made him search his program.  The line “Costumes by Dane,” had lighted up in his mind a wild surmise of the truth, though he admitted it had seemed almost too good to be true.  Because the costumes were really wonderful.  He tried to tell them how wonderful they were, but Violet seemed to regard this as a digression.  She wanted facts.

“Anyhow,” he put in in confirmation, “there wasn’t a single paper the next day that didn’t feature the costumes in speaking of the performance.  They were the one unqualified hit of the show.”

He cast about in his mind, he said, for some way of finding out who Dane really was.  And having learned that Galbraith was putting on the show at the Casino, and having reflected that he was as likely to know about Rose as anybody, he looked him up.

“Galbraith, you know,” he explained, “is the man who put on The Girl Up-stairs here at the Globe, winter before last.”

Galbraith proved a mine of information—­no, not a mine, because you had to dig to get things out of a mine.  Galbraith was more like one of those oil-wells that is technically known as a gusher.  He simply spouted facts about Rose and couldn’t be stopped.  She was his own discovery.  He’d seen her possibilities when she designed and executed those twelve costumes for the sextette in The Girl Up-stairs.  He’d brought her down to New York to act as his assistant.  She worked for Galbraith the greater part of last season.  Jimmy had never known of anybody having just that sort of job before.  Galbraith, busy with two or three productions at once, had put over a lot of the work of conducting rehearsals on her shoulders.  He’d get a number started, having figured out the maneuvers the chorus were to go through, the steps they’d use and so on, and then Rose would actually take his place; would be in complete charge of the rehearsal as the director’s representative, while he was off doing something else.

It must have been an extraordinarily interesting job, Jimmy thought, and evidently she’d got away with it, since Galbraith spoke of the loss of her with unqualified regret.