e pulled the shop door to behind him. She didn't go out
on to the sidewalk, but lingered in the recessed doorway. "I thought if
you'd let me fake that evening frock for twenty dollars, and then buy
the little Empire one for Olga Larson--it's only eighty--that the two
would average just about what Mrs. Goldsmith was paying for the others."

"Why not fake the other one too?" he asked.

"It couldn't be done," said Rose decisively. "There's no idea in it, you
see, that just jumps out and catches you. It gets its style from being
so--reserved and so just exactly right. And of course that's true of the
girl herself. She's perfect, just about. But it's a perfection that it's
awfully easy to kill. She kills it herself by the way she does her
hair."

Buzzing around in the back of John Galbraith's mind was an unworded
protest against the way Rose had just killed her own beauty with a thick
white veil so nearly opaque that all it let him see of her face was an
intermittent gleam of her eyes. Keenly aware--a good deal more keenly
aware than he was willing to admit--of the sort of splendor which, but
for the veil, he'd be looking at now, a splendor which nothing short of
a complete mask could hide, he was not quite in the mood to wax
enthusiastic over a beauty so fragile as that of the girl they had been
talking about. There was a momentary silence, broken again, by Rose.

"Of course, you'll want to take a look at her for yourself, before you
decide," she said; "but I'm pretty sure you'll see it." She put a
cadence of finality into her voice. The business between them was over,
it said, and all she was waiting for was a word of dismissal, to nod
him a farewell and go swinging away down the avenue. Still he didn't
speak, and she moved a little restlessly. At last:--

"Do you mind crossing the street?" he asked abruptly. "Then we can talk
as we walk along." She must have hesitated, because he added, "It's too
cold to stand here."

"Of course," she said then. All that had made her hesitate was her
surprise over his having made a request instead of giving an order.

Galbraith turned her north on the vast empty east sidewalk--a highway in
itself broader than many a famous European street, and they walked a
little way in silence.

No observant Chicagoan, Rose reflected, need ever yearn for the wastes
of the Sahara when a desire for solitude or the need of privacy came
upon him. The east side of Michigan Avenue was just as solitary