rilling
sense of adventure that missed being fear only through an inexplicable
confidence of success. And then, anyway, her imagination was a virgin
field that had never been cropped, and the luxurious fertility of it was
amazing.

It was during that first rehearsal, which she so narrowly missed being
late for, that she got the general schemes for both sets of costumes.
That there must be a general scheme she had decided at once. The
sextette was a unit; none of the members of it ever appeared without the
others, and it would be immensely more effective, she perceived, if this
fact were expressed somehow in the costumes. Not by means of a stupid
uniformity, of course. The effect she wanted was subtler than that. But
if each one of the six costumes that these girls first appeared in could
be made somehow to express the same thing in a different way--not only
in different, though harmonious, colors, but in different, though
related, forms--the effect produced by the six of them together would be
immensely greater than the sum of their individual effects.

This, of course, wasn't what Rose said to herself. She just wanted a
scheme, and with ridiculous ease, she got it. She didn't even get it.
There it was staring at her. And the other scheme for the evening frocks
was knocking at the door, too, eager to get in the moment she could give
it a chance. She began studying the girls for their individual
peculiarities of style. Each one of the costumes she made was going to
be for a particular girl, suited, without losing its place in the
general plan, to the enhancement of her special approximation to beauty.

At last, when a shout from Galbraith aroused her to the fact that she
had missed an entrance cue altogether, in her entranced absorption in
these visions of hers, and had caused that unpardonable thing, a stage
wait, she resolutely clamped down the lid upon her imagination and,
until they were dismissed, devoted herself to the rehearsal.

But the pressure kept mounting higher and higher and she found herself
furiously impatient to get away, back to her own private wonderland, the
squalid little room down the street, that had three bolts of cambric in
it and a dressmaker's manikin--the raw materials for her magic!

Rose couldn't draw a bit. Her mother's fine contempt for ladylike
accomplishments had even intervened in the high-school days to prevent
her taking a free-hand course required in the curriculum, during which