n money for something and trusted to a
prosperous event for getting it back. It was clearly for the good of the
show that the costumes for the sextette should be better than the ones
Mrs. Goldsmith had picked out. The only alternative way of getting them,
to a knock-down and carry-away fight with Goldsmith and Block, which,
even if it were successful, would weaken the effect of his next
ultimatum, was the plan he now proposed to Rose. She needn't regard the
money he put up as in any sense a personal loan to her. They were simply
cooperating for the good of the enterprise. If her work turned out to be
valuable, it was only right she should be paid for it.

And then he pressed her for an immediate decision. The job would be a
good deal of a scramble at best, as the time was short. If she agreed to
it, he'd get in touch with the wardrobe mistress at the Globe, to-night.
As for the money, he had a hundred dollars or so in his pocket, which
she could take to start out with.

Of course the only lie involved in all this was the warp of the whole
fabric; that he was doing it, impersonally, for the success of the show.
And that might well enough have been true. Only in this case, it
definitely wasn't. He was doing it because it would establish a personal
connection, the want of which was becoming so tormenting a thing to his
soul, between himself and this girl whom he had to order about on the
stage and call by her last name, or rather by a last name that wasn't
hers--an imagination-stirring, question-compelling, warm human creature,
who, up to now, had been as completely shut away from him as if she had
been a wax figure in a show-window.

They had reached the Randolph Street end of the avenue, and a policeman,
like Moses cleaving the Red Sea, had opened the way through the tide of
motors for a throng of pedestrians bound across the viaduct to the
Illinois Central suburban station.

"Come across here," said Galbraith taking her by the arm and stemming
this current with her. "We've got to have a minute of shelter to finish
this up in," and he led her into the north lobby of the public library.
The stale baked air of the place almost made them gasp. But, anyway, it
was quiet and altogether deserted. They could hear themselves think in
here, he said, and led the way to a marble bench alongside the
staircase.

Rose unpinned her veil and, to his surprise, because of course she was
going out in a minute, put it into her ulster p