woman in a company he
was directing, would be inexpressible--unfathomable. Of course when a
man's job was finished--and this sort of job nearly always did finish on
the opening night--why, after that, his affairs were his own affair.

In a word: he ordered his life on the perfectly sound masculine instinct
for keeping his work and his sex emotions in separate water-tight
compartments. Rose was a working member of his production, and it was
therefore flagrantly impossible that his relation with her should be
other than purely professional.

And yet there had been something intangibly personal from the very
first, about every one of their broken momentary conversations--almost
about every meeting of their eyes. It had disturbed him the first time
he had ever seen her smile. He remembered the occasion well enough. She
had just finished executing the dance step--the almost inexcusably
vulgar little dance step he had ordered her to do as a condition of
getting the job she said she wanted--had turned on him blazing with
indignation; but right in the full blaze of it, at something she must
have seen, and understood, in his own face, in deprecation of her own
wrath, she had, slowly and widely, smiled.

And then the way she worked for him in rehearsal! He'd seen girls work
hard before--desperately, frantically hard, under the fear that they
weren't good enough to hold their jobs. That wasn't the spirit in which
this girl worked. She seemed possessed by a blazing determination that
the results he wanted should he obtained. It seemed she couldn't devour
his intentions quickly enough, and her little unconscious nod of
satisfaction after he had corrected a mistake and she felt sure that now
she knew exactly what he wanted, was like nothing in his previous
experience.

The wonderful thing about it was that she carried that eagerness beyond
the confines of her own job. And she put it to good effect too. She had
taken that Larson girl and, by the plain force of personal dominance,
made her talk right. Well, why? That was the question. Who was she
anyway? Where had she come from? Who was "the only person who really
mattered" to her--the person who wasn't a pussy-cat?

He had tried hard to convince himself that these were all professional
questions. It was true they had a bearing on the more important and
perfectly legitimate question whether he had, in this altogether
extraordinary personality, discovered a new star. He had, during