more sensible for me to find another job?
So that we could--well, take a fresh start?"

"Child," he said, "don't you know there's no such thing in the world as
a fresh start? Or a new leaf? That's a comfortable delusion for cowards.
The situation's in a mess, is it? All right, run away. Begin again with
a clean slate. But the first thing written down on that slate is that
you've just run away. Besides, suppose you do get another job, working,
say, for another director. How do you know that he won't fall in love
with you?"

That last sentence went by unheard. She was staring at him, almost in
consternation. "That's true," she said. "That's perfectly true. That
about running away. I--I never thought of it before." She went back to
her chair and dropped into it rather limply. She sat there through a
long silence, still thinking over his words and apparently almost
frightened over her own implications from them.

At last he said, "You've no cause for worry over that, I should think. I
don't believe you've ever run away from anything yet."

"I don't know," she answered thoughtfully. "I don't know whether I did
or not."

"Well," he came out at last, getting to his feet, "how about it? What
shall we do this time? Shall we tackle the situation and try to make the
best of it, or ..."

"Yes, that's what we'll do," she said. "And, well, I'm much obliged to
you for putting me right."

"I made all the trouble in the first place," said Galbraith, with a
rueful sort of grin. "It was up to me to think of something."

And after the elevator she'd escorted him to had carried him down, she
stood there in the hallway smiling, with the glow of a quite new
friendliness for him warming her heart.

It was natural, of course, that the relation between them after that day
should not prove quite so simple and manageable a thing as it had looked
that morning. There were breathless days when the storm visibly hung in
the sky; there were strained, stiff, self-conscious moments of rigidly
enforced politeness. Things got said despite his resolute repression
that had, as resolutely, to be ignored.

But in the intervals of these failures there emerged, and endured
unbroken for longer periods, the new thing they sought--genuine
friendliness, partnership.

It was just after Christmas that Abe Shuman took her away from him and
put her to work exclusively on costumes. And the swift sequence of
events within a month thereafter launched her in a