The costuming, last season, had been a side issue, at the beginning at least, but she’d done part of the costumes for one of his productions, and they were so strikingly successful that Abe Shuman had simply snatched her away from him.

“The funny thing is the way she does them,” Jimmy said.  “Everybody else who designs costumes, just draws them; dinky little water-colored plates, and the plates are sent out to a company like The Star Costume Company, and they execute them.  But Rose can’t draw a bit.  She got a manikin—­not an ordinary dressmaker’s form, but a regular painter’s manikin with legs, and made her costumes on the thing; or at least cut out a sort of pattern of them in cloth.  But somehow or other, the designing of them and the execution are more mixed up together by Rose’s method than by the orthodox one.  She wanted to get some women in to sew for her, and see the whole job through herself; deliver the costumes complete, and get paid for them.  But it seems that the Shumans, on the side, owned The Star Company and raked off a big profit on the costumes that way.  I don’t know all the details.  I don’t know that Galbraith did.  But, anyhow, the first thing anybody knew, Rose had financed herself.  She got one of those rich young bachelor women in New York to go into the thing with her, and organized a company, and made Abe Shuman an offer on all the costumes for Come On In.  Galbraith thinks that Abe Shuman thought she was sure to lose a lot of money on it and go broke and that then he could put her to work at a salary, so he gave her the job.

“But she didn’t lose.  She evidently made a chunk out of it, and her reputation at the same time.”

Violet was immensely thrilled by this recital.  “Won’t she be perfectly wonderful,” she exclaimed, “for the Junior League show, when she comes back!”

Jimmy found an enormous satisfaction in saying, “Oh, she’ll be too expensive for you.  She’s a regular robber, she says.”

“She says!” cried Violet.  “Do you mean you’ve talked with her?”

“Do you think I’d have come hack from New York without?” said Jimmy.  “Galbraith told me to drop in at the Casino that same afternoon.  Some of the costumes were to be tried on, and either ‘Miss Dane’ or some one of her assistants would be there.  Probably she herself, though he knew she was dreadfully busy.

“Well, and she came.  I almost fell over her out there in the dark, because of course the auditorium wasn’t lighted at all.  I’ll admit she rather took my breath, just glancing up at me, and peering to make out who I was, and then her face going all alight with that smile of hers.  I didn’t know what to call her, and was stammering over a mixture of Miss Dane and Mrs. Aldrich, when she laughed and held out a hand to me and said she didn’t remember whether I’d ever called her Rose or not, but she’d like to hear some one call her that, and wouldn’t I begin.”