ins 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.

"And there's no telling when I'll be back," she added, "so if there's
anything to talk about, you'd better seize the chance and tell me now."

Alice couldn't be blamed if her face was a study. She knew that Aldrich
was