y fat woman who
wouldn't have touched her with tongs? But from not one of these
experiences had he ever seen her flinch or protest. Oh, yes, she was
game, and she was simple, as they always were; a fine type of the real
thing.

And, somehow, he felt, she treated him as if he were hall-marked too.
He hadn't much to go by--absurdly little things really. But, after all,
it was the little things that counted;--a fine distinction in the
cadence of a voice, in the sort of nod of greeting or farewell one gave.
She never nodded at him in that curt telegraphic sort of way without
warming him up a bit inside.

And all the while he was a director and she was a chorus-girl and an
unyielding etiquette of their respective professions forbade a word of
human intercourse between them! He had violated it, as both of them had
been aware, when he shook hands with her and thanked her for having
taught Olga Larson to talk. And just because he recognized quite well
how necessary the barrier was in all but one out of a thousand cases,
its existence in this one case baffled and irritated him.

Up to the hour when he had turned into Lessing's store this afternoon,
for a look at the dresses Mrs. Goldsmith had been picking out for the
sextette, this feeling of baffled curiosity and of irritation over the
etiquette that forbade his satisfying it, would have summed up,
adequately enough, all the emotions he was conscious of toward the girl.
His professional admiration for her was another thing of course--a
perfectly legitimate thing. But with her appearance from behind the
screen, in that French evening gown--a gown she wore with the
indescribable air of belonging in it--with all her vibrant, irregular,
fascinating, eupeptic beauty fully revealed, his mood of impatient
acquiescence had fallen away. The basis of his feeling toward her
shifted in a manner that James Randolph wouldn't have had a moment's
difficulty in explaining, although Galbraith didn't understand it
himself.

The thing he was conscious of was, when she made that offer to copy this
gown herself for twenty dollars and so leave him leeway for the purchase
of the Empire frock for Olga--offering to go to that trouble not for
herself or her friend, but to further the accomplishment of what he
wanted; namely, the success of his production--what he was conscious of
then, was an overpowering desire to make a confidante of her; to talk
matters out with her, show her some of the major st