On the stroke of twelve his card was brought to her, and she went out into their bare little waiting-room to meet him.

“We aren’t a regular dressmaking establishment, you see,” she said.  “The people we have to impress aren’t the ones we make the clothes for.  So we can be as shabby down here as we please, and Alice says—­Alice Perosini, you know—­that our shabbiness really does impress them.  Shows we don’t care what they think.

“You’re sure you’ve plenty of time to see around in?” she went on.  “That it won’t cut into your time for lunch?”

He made it plain that he had plenty of time, and she took him into her own studio, a big north-lighted room at the back of the building, with the painter’s manikins that Jimmy Wallace had told about, standing about in it, and some queer-looking electric-light fixtures suggestive of the stage; a big tin-lined box with half a dozen powerful tungsten lamps in it, and grooves in the mouth of it for the reception of colored slides.  And a sort of search-light that swung on a pivot.  There was a high cutting-table with a deep indentation in it, in which Rose could stand with her work all around her.  On a shelf in a corner he noticed two or three little figures twelve inches high or so that he’d have thought of as dolls had it not been that their small heads gave them the scale of adults.  Rose followed his glance.

“I play with those,” she said.  “Dress them in all sorts of things—­tissue-paper mostly.  It seems easier to catch an idea small in the tips of my fingers, and then let it grow up.  You have to find out for yourself how you can do things, don’t you?”

Then she took him out into the workroom, where there were more cutting-tables and power-driven sewing-machines.

“‘It never rains but it pours,’ is the motto of this business,” she told him.  “Nobody ever knows what he wants until the very last minute, and then he wants it the next, and everybody wants it at once.  And then this place is like a madhouse.  We simply go out of our heads.  It was like that when Jimmy Wallace was down here.  I hadn’t a minute for him.”

She added deliberately, “I’m glad you didn’t come down then,” and went swiftly on to explain to him a sort of pantograph arrangement which could be set with reference to the measurements of the manikin Rose had designed the costume upon, and those of the girl who was going to wear it, so that the pattern for the costume itself, as distinct from Rose’s master-pattern, was cut almost automatically to fit.

“It’s not really automatic, of course,” she said.  “No costume’s done until I have seen it on the girl who’s going to wear it.  But it does save time.”

Alice Perosini came in just then, and a breath-taking spectacle she’d have been to most men in the frock she had on.  But it was not Rodney who gasped.  It was Alice herself who almost did, when Rose introduced him to her, without explanations, as Mr. Aldrich and said she was going out to lunch with him.