s no getting away
from that.

But Goldsmith and Block came back the next day and drove, in turn, a
good bargain of their own.

"You've certainly got a good eye for costumes, Miss Dane," Goldsmith
said, "and here's a proposition we'd like to make. A lot of these other
things we've got for the regular chorus don't look so good as they
might. You'll be able to see changes in them that'll improve them maybe
fifty per cent. Well, you take it on, and we'll begin paying you your
regular salary now; you understand, twenty-five dollars a week,
beginning to-day."

Rose accepted this proposition with a warm flush of gratitude. It
indicated, she felt, that they were still friendly toward her, disposed
of certain misgivings she'd experienced the night before, lest in
driving, unwittingly, so good a bargain with them, she had incurred
their enmity.

But, from the moment her little salary began, she found herself
retained, body and soul, exactly as Galbraith himself was. They'd bought
all her ideas, all her energy, all her time, except a few scant hours
for sleep and a few snatched minutes for meals. She gave her employers,
up to the time when the piece opened at the Globe, at a conservative
calculation, about five times their money's worth. Even if she hadn't
been in the company she'd have found something like two days' work in
every twenty-four hours, just in the wardrobe room. Because the costumes
were cheap and the frank blaze of borders, footlights and spots,
pitilessly betrayed the fact. One set for the ponies was so hopelessly
bad that the owners refused to accept them, and Rose, on the spur of the
moment, made up a costume--they were uniform, fortunately--to replace
them. The wardrobe mistress, with two assistants, and under Rose's
intermittent supervision, managed somehow to get them made. And there
wasn't a single costume, outside Rose's own twelve, that hadn't to be
remodeled more or less.

On top of all that, the really terrible grind of rehearsals began;
property rehearsals, curiously disconcerting at first, where instead of
indicating the business with empty hands, you actually lighted the
cigarette, picked up the paper knife, pulled the locket out from under
your dress and opened it--and, in the process of doing these things,
forgot everything else you knew; scenery rehearsals that caused the
stage to seem small and cluttered up and actually made some of the
evolutions you'd been routined in, impossible. At last