"Good God!" said Galbraith. "Devereux said it couldn't be done, and I agreed with her. Well, live and learn. Look here! Will you teach the others--the other four in the sextette? I'll see you're paid for it."

"Why, yes,--of course," said Rose, hesitating a little.

"Oh, I don't mean overnight," he said, "but mornings--between rehearsals--whenever you can."

"I wasn't thinking of that," said Rose. "I was just wondering if they'd want to be taught--I mean, by another chorus-girl, you know."

"They'll want to be taught if they want to keep their jobs," said Galbraith. And then, to her astonishment, and also perhaps to his, for the thing was radically out of the etiquette of the occasion, he reached out and shook hands with her. "I'm very much obliged to you," he said.

CHAPTER V

MRS. GOLDSMITH'S TASTE

If there was a profession in the world which Rose had never either idly or seriously considered as a possible one for herself, that of a teacher was it. And yet, the first money she ever earned in her life was the twenty dollars the management paid her for teaching the other four girls in the sextette to say their lines. She was a born teacher, too. And the born teacher is a rare bird.

One must know something in the first place, of course, before one can teach it--a fact that has resulted in the fitting of an enormous number of square pegs into round holes. Most of the people in the world who are trying to teach, are those whose aptitude is for learning. But the scholar's temper and the teacher's are antipodal; a salient, vivid personality that can command attention, the unconscious will to conquer--to enforce (a very different thing from the wish to do these things) that is the _sine qua non_ for a real teacher. And that, of course, was Rose all over.

Those four sulky, rather supercilious chorus-girls, coming to Rose under a threat of dismissal, for lessons in the one last thing that a free-born American will submit to dictation about, might not want to learn, nor mean to learn, but they couldn't help learning. You couldn't be unaware of Rose and, being aware of her, you couldn't resist doing things as she wanted you to.

Informally, too, she taught them other things than speech. "Here, Waldron!" Galbraith would say. "This is no cake-walk. All you've got to do is to cross to that chair and sit down in it like a lady. Show her how to do it, Dane." And Rose, with her good-humored disarming smile at the infuriated Waldron, would go ahead and do it.

I won't pretend that she was a favorite with the other members of the sextette, barring Olga. But she managed to avoid being cordially hated, which was a very solid personal triumph.

I have said that there were two small incidents destined to have a powerful influence at this time, in Rose's life. One of them I have told you about--the chance that led her to teach Olga Larson to talk. The other concerned itself with a certain afternoon frock in a Michigan Avenue shop.

The owners of _The Girl Up-stairs_ were very inadequately experienced in the business of putting on musical comedies. Galbraith spoke of them as amateurs, and couldn't, really, have described them better. Your professional gambler--for musical-comedy producing is an especially sporting form of gambling and nothing else--assesses his chances in advance, decides coolly whether they are worth taking or not, and then, with a steely indifference awaits the event. The amateur, on the contrary, is always fluttering between an insane confidence and a shuddering despair; between a reckless disregard of money and a foolish attempt to save it. It had been in one of their hot fits that the owners of _The Girl Up-stairs_ had retained Galbraith. The news item Rose had read had not exceeded truth in saying that he was one of the three greatest directors in the country. They couldn't have got him out to Chicago at all but for the chance that he was, just then, at the end of a long-time contract with the Shumans and holding off for better terms before he signed a new one. The owners were staggered at the prices they had to pay him, at that, but they recovered and were still blowing warm when they authorized him to engage Devereux, Stewart, Astor and McGill (McGill was the chief comedian, the Cosmetic King) for all of these were high-priced people.

But by the time the question of costumes came up, they were shivering in a perfect ague of apprehension. Was there no limit to the amount they were to be asked to spend? This figure that Galbraith indicated as the probable cost of having a first-class brigand in New York design the costumes and a firm of pirates in the same neighborhood execute them, was simply insane. New York managers might be boobs enough to submit to such an extortion, but they, believe them, were not. Many of the costumes could be bought, ready made, on State Street or Michigan Avenue. Some of the fancy things could be executed by a competent wardrobe mistress, if some one would give her the ideas. And ideas--one could pick them up anywhere. Mrs. Goldsmith, now,--she was the wife of the senior of the two owners--had splendid taste and would be glad to put it at their service. There was no reason why she should not at once take the sextette down-town and fit them out with their dresses.

Galbraith shrugged his shoulders, but made no further complaint. It was, he admitted, as they had repeatedly pointed out, their own money. So a rendezvous was made between Mrs. Goldsmith and the sextette for Lessing's store on Michigan Avenue at three o'clock on an afternoon when Galbraith was to be busy with the principals. He might manage to drop in before they left to cast his eye over and approve the selection.

It was with some rather uncomfortable misgivings that Rose set out to revisit a part of town so closely associated with the first year of her married life. The particular shop wasn't, luckily, one that she had patronized in that former incarnation. But it was in the same block with a half dozen that were, and she hadn't been east of Clark Street since the day Otto had driven her to the Polk Street Station.

The day was cold and blustery--a fact that she was grateful for, as it gave her an excuse for wearing a thick white veil, which was almost as good as a mask. It was with a rather breathless excitement that persisted in feeling like guilt--her heart wouldn't have beaten any faster, she believed, if she had just robbed a jewelry store and were walking away with the swag in her pocket--that she debouched out of Van Buren Street, around the corner of the Chicago Club, and into the avenue. Unconsciously, she had been expecting to meet every one she knew, beginning with Frederica, in the course of the two blocks or so she had to walk. Very naturally, she didn't catch even a glimpse of any one she even remotely knew. Suppose there should be any one in the store! But this, she realized, wasn't likely.

It wasn't a really smart shop. It paid an enormous rent there in that neighborhood in order to pretend to be, and the gowns on the wax figures in its windows, were taken on faith by pleasurably scandalized pedestrians as the very latest scream of fashion. The prices on these confections were always in the process of a violent reduction, as large exclamatory placards grievously testified. The legend eighty-eight dollars crossed out in red lines, with thirty-nine seventy-five written below, for a sample. The most exclusive smartness for the economy-loving multitude. This was the slogan.

Rose, arriving promptly at the hour agreed on, had a wait of fifteen minutes before any of her sisters of the sextette, or Mrs. Goldsmith arrived. She told the suave manager that she was waiting for friends, but this didn't deter him from employing a magnificent wave of the hand to summon one of the saleswomen and consigning Rose almost tenderly, to her care. He didn't know her, but he knew that that ulster of hers had come straight over from Paris, had cost not less than two hundred dollars, and had been selected by an excellently discriminating eye; and that was enough for him.

"I don't want anything just now," Rose told the saleswoman. But she hadn't, in these few weeks of Clark Street, lost the air of one who will buy if she sees anything worth buying. In fact, the saleswoman thought, correctly, that she knew her and was in for a shock a little later when Mrs. Goldsmith and the other five members of the sextette arrived.

Meanwhile, she showed Rose the few really smart things they had in the store--a Poiret evening gown, a couple of afternoon frocks from Jennie, and so on. There wasn't much, she admitted, it being just between seasons. Their Palm Beach things weren't in yet.

Rose made a few appreciative, but decidedly respect-compelling comments, and faithfully kept one eye on the door.

The rest of the sextette arrived in a pair and a trio. One of them squealed, "Hello, Dane!" The saleswoman got her shock on seeing Rose nod an acknowledgment of this greeting and just about that time, they heard Mrs. Goldsmith explaining who she was and the nature of her errand, to the manager. The necessary identifications got themselves made somehow.

They weren't in any sense introductions, everybody in the store felt that plainly. Mrs. Goldsmith was touching the skirts of musical comedy with a very long pair of tongs. There was absolutely no connection, social or personal, between herself and the young persons who were to wear the frocks she was going to buy.

She stood them up and stared at them through her eye-glasses, discussed their various physical idiosyncrasies with candor, and, one by one, packed them off to try on haphazard selections from the mounds which three industrious saleswomen piled up before her. You couldn't deny her the possession of a certain force of character, for not one of the six girls uttered a word of suggestion or of protest.

And the sort of gowns she was exclaiming over with delight and ordering put into the heap of possibilities, were horrible enough to have drawn a protest from the wax figures in the windows. The more completely the fundamental lines of a frock were disguised with sartorial scroll-saw work, the more successful this lady felt it to be. An ornament, to Mrs.

Goldsmith, did not live up to its possibilities, unless it in turn were decorated with ornaments of its own; like the fleas on the fleas on the dog.

It is a tribute to one of the qualities that made John Galbraith a successful director, that Rose spent a miserable half-hour worrying over these selections of the wife of the principal owner of the show, feeling she ought to put up some sort of fight and hardly deterred by the patent futility of such a course. To rest her esthetic senses from the delirium of fussiness that was giving Mrs. Goldsmith so much pleasure, she began thinking about that Poiret frock--the superb simple audacity of it! It had been made by an artist who knew where to stop. And he had stopped rather incredibly soon. Just suppose ... And then her eyes lighted up, gazed thoughtfully out the window across the wind-swept desert of the avenue, and, presently she grinned--widely, contentedly.

For the next hour and a half, during the intervals of her own trying on, she entertained herself very happily with the day-dream that she herself had a commission to design the costumes for _The Girl Up-stairs_. She had always done that more or less, she realized, when she went to musical-comedy shows with Rodney, especially when they were badly costumed. But this time she did it a good deal more vividly, partly because her interest in the piece was more intense, partly because her imagination had a blank canvas to work on.

All the while, like Sister Anne in the tower, she kept one eye on the door and prayed for the arrival of John Galbraith.

He came in just as Mrs. Goldsmith finished her task--just when, by a process of studious elimination, every passable thing in the store had been discarded and the twelve most utterly hopeless ones--two for each girl--laid aside for purchase. The girls were despatched to put on the evening frocks first, and were then paraded before the director.

He was a diplomat as I have said (possibly I spoke of him before as an acrobat. It comes to the same thing), and he was quick on his feet.

Rose, watching his face very closely, thought that for just a split second, she caught a gleam of ineffable horror. But it was gone so quickly she could almost have believed that she had been mistaken. He didn't say much about the costumes, but he said it so promptly and adequately that Mrs. Goldsmith beamed with pride. She sent the girls away to put on the other set--the afternoon frocks, and once more the director's approbation, though laconic, was one hundred per cent. pure.

"That's all," he said in sudden dismissal of the sextette. "Rehearsal at eight-thirty."

Five of them scurried like children let out of school, around behind the set of screens that made an extemporaneous dressing-room, and began changing in a mad scramble, hoping to get away and to get their dinners eaten soon enough to enable them to see the whole bill at a movie show before the evening's rehearsal.

But Rose didn't avail herself of her dismissal--remained hanging about, a couple of paces away from where Galbraith was talking to Mrs.

Goldsmith. The only question that remained, he was telling her, was whether her selections were not too--well, too refined, genteel, one might say, for the stage. Regretfully he confessed he was a little afraid they were. It needed a certain crudity to withstand the glare of the footlights and until these gowns had been submitted to that glare, one couldn't be sure.

He wasn't looking at her as he talked, and presently, as his gaze wandered about the store, it encountered Rose's face. She hadn't prepared it for the encounter, and it wore, hardly veiled, a look of humorous appreciation. His sentence broke, then completed itself. She turned away, but the next moment he called out to her, "Were you waiting for me, Dane?"

"I'd like to speak to you a minute," she said, "when you have time."

"All right. Go and change your clothes first," he said.

Out of the tail of her eye as she departed, she saw him shaking hands with the owner's wife and thanking her effusively for her help.

Incidentally, he was leading her toward the door as he did it. And at the door, he declined an offer to be taken anywhere he might want to go in her electric.

She found the other girls on the point of departure. But Olga offered to wait for her.

"No, you run along," Rose said. "I've some errands and I don't feel like seeing a movie to-night, anyway."

Olga looked a little odd about it, but hurried along after the others.

A saleswoman--the same one the manager assigned to Rose under the misconception which that smart French ulster of hers had created when she came into the store--now came around behind the screen to gather up the frocks the girls had shed.

"Will you please bring me," said Rose, "that Poiret model you showed me before the others came in? I'll try it on."

The saleswoman's manner was different now and she grumbled something about its being closing time.

"Then, if you'll bring it at once ..." said Rose. And the saleswoman went on the errand.

Five minutes later, Galbraith from staring gloomily at the mournful heap of trouble Mrs. Goldsmith had left on his hands, looked up to confront a vision that made him gasp.