plaining who she was and the nature of her errand, to
the manager. The necessary identifications got themselves made somehow.
They weren't in any sense introductions, everybody in the store felt
that plainly. Mrs. Goldsmith was touching the skirts of musical comedy
with a very long pair of tongs. There was absolutely no connection,
social or personal, between herself and the young persons who were to
wear the frocks she was going to buy.

She stood them up and stared at them through her eye-glasses, discussed
their various physical idiosyncrasies with candor, and, one by one,
packed them off to try on haphazard selections from the mounds which
three industrious saleswomen piled up before her. You couldn't deny her
the possession of a certain force of character, for not one of the six
girls uttered a word of suggestion or of protest.

And the sort of gowns she was exclaiming over with delight and ordering
put into the heap of possibilities, were horrible enough to have drawn a
protest from the wax figures in the windows. The more completely the
fundamental lines of a frock were disguised with sartorial scroll-saw
work, the more successful this lady felt it to be. An ornament, to Mrs.
Goldsmith, did not live up to its possibilities, unless it in turn were
decorated with ornaments of its own; like the fleas on the fleas on the
dog.

It is a tribute to one of the qualities that made John Galbraith a
successful director, that Rose spent a miserable half-hour worrying over
these selections of the wife of the principal owner of the show, feeling
she ought to put up some sort of fight and hardly deterred by the patent
futility of such a course. To rest her esthetic senses from the delirium
of fussiness that was giving Mrs. Goldsmith so much pleasure, she began
thinking about that Poiret frock--the superb simple audacity of it! It
had been made by an artist who knew where to stop. And he had stopped
rather incredibly soon. Just suppose ... And then her eyes lighted up,
gazed thoughtfully out the window across the wind-swept desert of the
avenue, and, presently she grinned--widely, contentedly.

For the next hour and a half, during the intervals of her own trying on,
she entertained herself very happily with the day-dream that she herself
had a commission to design the costumes for _The Girl Up-stairs_. She
had always done that more or less, she realized, when she went to
musical-comedy shows with Rodney, especially when they