ith all the sang-froid in the world, sketched
out the articles of partnership and brought her in a certified check for
three thousand dollars.

The fact that they had become partners served, somehow, to divert a
relation between them which might otherwise have developed into a
first-class friendship. Not that they quarreled or even disappointed
each other in the close contacts of the day's work. They were admirably
complementary. Alice had the business acumen, the executive grasp, the
patient willingness to master details, which were needed to set Rose
free for the more imaginative part of the enterprise. Both were
immensely determined on success. Alice couldn't have been keener about
it if every cent she had in the world had been embarked in the business.

But at the end of the day's work they tended to fly apart rather than to
stick together. Both were charged with the same kind of static
electricity. It was an instinct they were sensible enough to follow.
Both realized that they were more efficient as partners from not going
too intimately into each other's outside affairs.

But when the winter had passed and the early spring had brought its
triumph, with the success of her costumes in _Come On In_, and when the
inevitable reaction from the burst of energy that had won that triumph
had taken possession of her, Rose found herself in need of a friendship
that would grip deeper, understand more. And with the realization of the
need of it she found she had it. It was a friendship that had grown in
the unlikeliest soil in the world, the friendship of a man who had
wanted to be her lover. The man was John Galbraith.

For the first month after she came to New York to work for him she had
found Galbraith a martinet. She never once caught that twinkling gleam
of understanding in his eye that had meant so much to her during the
rehearsals of _The Girl Up-stairs_. His manner toward her carried out
the tone of the letter she'd got from him in Centropolis. It was stiff,
formal, severe. He seldom praised her work and never ungrudgingly. His
censure was rare too, to be sure, but this obviously was because Rose
almost never gave him an excuse for it. Of course she was up to her
work, but, well, she had better be. This, in a nutshell, was his
attitude toward her. Nothing but the undisputable fact that she was up
to her work (Gertrude was comforting here, with her reticent but
convincing reports of Abe Shuman's satisfaction with he