“I suppose it is, for the others;” Rose said, “but—­I’m glad.”

It wouldn’t have needed so sensitive an ear as his to catch the girl’s full meaning.  Christmas—­this Christmas, the first since that mysterious collapse of her life, whose effect he had seen, but whose cause he couldn’t guess—­was going to be a terrible day for her.  She had dreaded lest it should be empty.  He wanted to say, “You poor child!” But—­this was the simple fact—­he was afraid to.

There was another momentary silence, and again Rose broke it.

“Do you think you’ll be able to convince Mrs. Goldsmith,” she asked, “that her gowns don’t look well on the stage?”

“Probably not,” he said in quick relief.  Rose had decided the issue for herself; brought up the very topic he’d wanted to bring up; got him off his dead center at last.  Back of Rose, of course, was the municipal Christmas tree with its power of suggesting a lot of ideas she must fight out of her mind.

“Certainly not,” he went on, “if you’re right about her, and I fancy you are, that her taste isn’t negative, but bad, and that it’s the very hideousness of the things she likes.  No, she won’t be convinced, and if I know Goldsmith, he’ll say his wife’s taste is good enough for him.  So if we want a change, we’ve a fight on our hands.”

The way he had unconsciously phrased that sentence startled him a little.

“The question is,” he went on, “whether they’re worth making a fight about.  Are they so bad as I think they are?”

“Oh, yes,” said Rose.  “They’re dowdy and fourth-class and ridiculous.  Of course I don’t know how many people in the audience would know that.”

“And I don’t care.” said John Galbraith with a flash of intensity that made her look round at him.  “That’s not a consideration I’ll give any weight to.  When I put out a production under my name, it means it’s the best production I can make with the means I’ve got.  There may be men who can work differently; but when I have to take a cynical view of it and try to get by with bad work because most of the people out in front won’t know the difference, I’ll retire.  I’m only fifty and I’ve got ten or fifteen good years in me yet.  But before I’ll do that, I’ll go out to my little farm on Long Island and raise garden truck.”

There was another momentary silence, for the girl made no comment at all on this statement of his credo.  But he felt sure, somehow, that she understood it and there was nothing deprecatory about the tone in which, presently, he went on speaking.

“Of course a director’s got only one weapon to use against the owners of a show, when it comes down to an issue, and that’s a threat to resign unless they let him have his way.  I’ve used that twice in this production already, and I can see one or two places coming where I may have to use it again.  So, if there’s any way of throwing out those costumes without giving them their choice between getting new ones or getting a new director, I’d like to find it.  Would it be possible, do you think, to get better ones that would also be cheaper?  That argument would bring Goldsmith around in a hurry.  It’s ridiculous, of course, but that’s the trouble with making a production for amateurs.  You spend more time fighting them, than you do producing the show.”