ying awake at rehearsal. See how
it works!"--accustomed to the liberty of saying things like that, and
then finding himself under the necessity of swallowing hard and counting
ten, and beginning with an--"I think, if you don't mind ...!" was in a
hard case.

Bertie Willis had his usefulness here. Sometimes Rose heard the director
whisper hoarsely, "For God's sake, don't let her do that! She _can't_ do
that!" and then Bertie would intervene and accomplish wonders by
diplomacy.

But it must be wonderfully exhilarating, Rose thought, to know exactly
why that girl was ridiculous and what to do to make her look right. And
to be able to sell your knowledge for three hundred dollars a week. This
was the sort of thing Rodney did, when one came to think of it. She
wondered whether he could sell his special sort of knowledge for as
much. That must be: the sort of possession Simone Greville had had in
mind when she said that nothing worth having could be bought cheap.
Neither Rodney nor the director had found his specialty growing on a
bush!

But her specialty, which in her life was to fill the place a knowledge
of stage dancing filled in the director's, was to come in a different
way. You paid a price, of course, for motherhood, in pain and peril, but
it remained a miraculous gift, for all that.

CHAPTER XII

WHAT HARRIET DID

She must wait for her miracle. As the weeks and months wore away, and as
the season of violent and high-frequency alternations between summer and
winter, which the Chicagoan calls spring, gave place to summer itself,
Rose was driven to intrench herself more and more deeply behind this
great expectation. It was like a dam holding back waters that otherwise
would have rushed down upon her and swept her away.

The problems went on mounting up behind the dam, of course. All the
minor luxuries of their way of living, which had been so keen a delight
to her during the first unthinking months of their married life; all the
sumptuous little elaborations of existence which she had explored with
such adventurous delight, had changed--now that she knew they had been
bought by the abridgment of her husband's freedom, by the invasion of
the clear space about himself which he had always so jealously
guarded--into a cloud of buzzing stinging distractions.

And they were the harder to bear now that she recognized how hard they
were going to be to drive away. It would have to be effected without
wounding