too."

The only sign of excitement there was in the girl's voice when she
answered, was a sort of exaggerated matter-of-factness. Oh, yes, there
was besides a wire edge on it, so that the words came to him through the
cold air with a kind of ringing distinctness.

"I could design the costumes and pick out the materials," she said, "but
we'd have to get a good sewing woman--perhaps more than one, to get them
done."

He wasn't greatly surprised. Perhaps the notion that she might suggest
something of the sort was responsible for the tentative dubious way in
which he had said he supposed it couldn't be done.

But Rose, at the sound of her own voice and the extraordinary
proposition it was uttering, was astonished clear through. She hadn't
had the remotest idea of saying such a thing a moment or two before.
What had suggested it, she couldn't have told. That day-dream perhaps,
that she had amused herself with while Mrs. Goldsmith was making up the
tale of her atrocities. Perhaps it had been just the suggestions
speaking in the tone, not the words, of John Galbraith's voice--that he
hoped she'd offer something like that.

Anyway, whatever it was that presented the idea to her, the thing that
seized on it and spoke it aloud was an instinct that didn't need to stop
and think--an instinct that realized indeed, if this isn't too
far-fetched a way of putting it, that its only chance lay in escaping
into the open ahead of the slower-footed processes of thought. If she
hadn't spoken instantly like that, it's perfectly clear she wouldn't
have spoken at all. But, having heard her own voice say the words, she
resolved, in spite of her fright--because she was frightened--to back
them up.

"You've had--experience in designing gowns, have you?" Galbraith asked.

"Only for myself," she admitted. "But I know I can do that part of it."

And she wasn't telling more than the truth! The confident excitement
that possessed her, gave a stronger assurance than any amount of
experience could have done.

"But,"--she reverted to the other part of the plan--"I'm not a good
sewer. I'd have to have somebody awfully good, who'd do exactly what I
told her."

"Oh, that can be managed;" he said a little absently, and with what
struck Rose as a mere man's ignorance of the difficulties of the
situation. Expert sewing women didn't grow on every bush. But at the end
of a silence that lasted while they walked a whole block, he convinced
her that sh