profane delight over the costumes. She
wondered at herself, sometimes, for having ceased to mind their
language, their shameless way of going half-clad, their general
atmosphere of moth-like worthlessness--and then laughed at herself for
wondering!

How would her own quality be finer, her soul a more ample thing, for the
keeping, on one of the shelves of it, of a pot of carefully preserved
horror? If she could succeed with these costumes, her success, she
hoped, would lead her directly into the business of designing other
costumes for the stage. And if she became a professional stage costumer,
this rather loose, ramshackle, down-at-the-heel morality of back-stage
musical comedy would be a permanent fact in her life, just as the
dustiness of law-books and the stuffiness of court rooms were permanent
facts in Rodney's.

As the work went on, her confidence in the success of this initiatory
venture became less ecstatic and more reasonable. A few of the costumes
were finished and, seen on live models (a couple of girls in the chorus
in the Globe show had volunteered to try on) were, if Rose knew anything
at all about clothes, without doubt or qualification, good.

She had had just one really bad quarter of an hour over them, and that,
back on Christmas Day as it happened, was when Galbraith, having
detained her after he had dismissed the rehearsal, asked to see her
sketches.

"Sketches!" she echoed, perplexed.

"Oh, I don't mean regular water-colored plates," he said. "Just whatever
rough drafts of the things you will have put down on paper to start
yourself off with. It's simple curiosity, you understand."

"But," she gasped, "I haven't put anything down on paper--not anything
at all! I don't know how to draw."

And now he was perplexed in turn. How could one design a costume without
drawing a picture of it?

She explained her working method to him; though not, she felt, very
successfully. She was perhaps a bit flustered, and he didn't seem to be
giving her his complete attention--seemed to be covering up, with the
pretense of listening, a strong interior abstraction.

This was again a good diagnosis as far as it went. Only it didn't dig in
far enough for even the faintest surmise as to what the nature of his
abstraction was.

"I could bring the patterns down here. Or, if you had time, you could
come up to my room and see them. But I'm afraid you couldn't tell much
from that, because they're all taken apart, yo