d Rose, beginning a little timidly, because she knew there were rocks
ahead for him, told him the tale that had its beginning in Lessing's
store; the story of Mrs. Goldsmith and her bad taste, of the Poiret
model that had suggested her great idea, of the offer she had made
Galbraith, the way she had bought her dressmaker's form and her bolts of
paper-cambric out of the Christmas rush, and had cut out her patterns in
the dead of nights after rehearsals, up in her little room on Clark
Street. She told him of the wild rush with which the costumes themselves
got made down under the stage at the Globe; of Galbraith's enthusiasm,
of the bargain she'd driven with Goldsmith and Block--the unwittingly
good bargain that had left her a profit of over two hundred dollars. She
told him how Goldsmith and Block had driven a good bargain of their own,
hiring her at her chorus-girl's salary for the last two delirious weeks;
how insanely hard she'd worked, and how, at last, after the opening
performance, Galbraith had offered her a job in New York when he should
be ready for her.

Somehow, while she told it, though it was only occasionally that she
glanced up at him--somehow, as she told it, she seemed to be hearing it
with his ears--to be thinking, actually, the very thoughts that were
going through his mind.

The central cord of it all, that everything else depended from, was, she
knew, the reflection that this triumphant narrative he was listening to
now, had been waiting on her lips to be told to him that night in the
room on Clark Street, and that the smoking smoldering fires of his
outraged pride and masculine sense of possession, had made the telling
impossible--had made everything impossible but that dull outcry of hers
that it had ended--like this.

But he never winced. Indeed, now and then when she tried to run ahead in
a way to elide this incident or that, he asked questions that brought
out all the details, and at the end he said with undisguised gravity,
but quite steadily:

"So after the play opened you were just waiting for Galbraith to send
for you. Why--why did you go on the road, instead of to New York?"

"He hadn't sent for me yet, and I'd made up my mind, by that time, that
he meant not to. And I was too tired just then to come down here and try
for anything else. I went on the road for a sort of rest-cure."

He sat for a good while after that in a reflective silence. And, at the
end of it, deliberately introduc