long private conference with each of them--the fact that they would not
speak at all off stage guaranteed him against their comparing notes as
to what he'd said--and while the thing he effected could not be called a
reconciliation, it amounted to a sort of armed truce. They went through
their love scenes without actually scratching and biting.

Even little Anabel Astor, whose good humor for a long time had seemed
invincible, tempestuously left the stage one day in the middle of one of
her scenes with her dancing partner, and could be heard sobbing loudly
in the wings through all that remained of that rehearsal.

Queer things began happening to the plot, resulting sometimes from the
violent transposition of song numbers from one act to another, sometimes
from the interpolation of songs or specialties. Two or three scenes,
which the author regarded with special pride and was prepared to die in
the defense of, were pronounced by Galbraith to be junk. He had made
superhuman efforts, he told Goldsmith and Block, to put a little life
into them, and had demonstrated that this miracle was impossible of
performance. They were dead and they'd got to be buried before they
became, to the olfactory sense, any more unpleasant.

There was an ominous breathlessness in the air after this ultimatum had
been delivered, and at the next rehearsal, when the director announced
the cut of six solid pages of manuscript, the voice of the author was
heard from back of the hall proclaiming in a hollow Euripidean bellow
that it was all over. He was going to his lawyer to get an injunction
against the production of the piece.

Of all the persons directly, or even remotely, affected by this
nerve-shattering confusion, Rose was perhaps the least perturbed. The
only thing that really mattered to her, was the successful execution of
those twelve costumes. The phantasmagoria at North End Hall was a
regrettable, but necessary, interruption of her more important
activities. The interruption didn't interfere so seriously as at first
she thought it would. The routine of rehearsal as Galbraith developed
it, began with special scenes--isolated bits that needed modification or
polishing. The general rehearsals, taking this act or that and going
through with it from beginning to end, and involving, of course, the
presence of everybody in the company, didn't, as a rule, begin till
three in the afternoon; sometimes till as late as five. Of course when
they did