Well, and now it had come and gone! The surgery of the thing was over.

The nerves and sinews were cut. The thing was done. The girl who stood there now in her three-dollar room was free; had won a fresh blank page to write the characters of her life upon.

She felt a little guilty about this. What heartless sort of a monster must she be to feel--why, actually happy, at a moment like this? She ought to be prone on the bed, her face buried in the musty pillow, sobbing her heart out.

But presently, standing there, looking down on the lumpy bed, she smiled widely instead, over the notion of doing it as a sort of concession to respectability. She had got her absolution from Rodney himself out of the memory of their first real talk together. Discipline, he'd said, was accepting the facts of life as they were. Not raising a lamentation because they weren't different. The only way you had of getting anywhere was by riding on the backs of your own passions. Well, her great ride was just beginning!

Rose dusted the mirror with a towel--a reckless act, as she saw for herself, when she discovered she was going to have to use that towel for a week--and took an appraising look at herself. Then she nodded confidently--there was nothing the matter with her looks--and resumed her ulster, her rubbers and her umbrella, for it was the kind of December day that called for all three. Her landlady could stick the receipt under the door, she reflected, as she locked it.

Two blocks down the street, she found, as predicted, the cigar store with the blue sign, "Schulz Express," and left her trunk check there with her address and fifty cents. Then, putting up her umbrella, and glowingly conscious that she was saving a nickel by so doing, she set off down-town afoot to get a job. She meant to get it that very afternoon. And, partly because she meant to so very definitely, she did.

I don't mean to say that getting a job is a purely volitional matter.

There is the factor of luck, always large of course, though not quite so large as a great many people suppose, and the factor of intelligence.

Rose's intelligence had been in pretty active training for the last year. Ever since her talk with Simone Greville had set her thinking, she had been learning how to weigh and assess facts apart from their emotional nebulae. She'd taught herself how to look a disagreeable or humiliating fact in the face as steadily and as coolly as she looked at any other fact.

She had accumulated a whole lot of facts about women in industry from Barry Lake and Jane. She knew the sort of job and the sort of pay that the average untrained woman gets. She knew some of the reasons why the pay was so miserably, intolerably small. She knew about the vast army of young women who weren't expected to be fully self-supporting, who counted on marrying comfortably enough some day, and accepted board and lodging at home as one of the natural laws of existence. But who, if they wanted pocket money, pretty enough clothes to make them attractive enough for men to want to marry; who, if they wanted to escape the stupid drudgery of housework at home, had to go to work. They'd rather get eight dollars a week than six, of course, or ten than eight. But as long as even six was velvet (cotton-backed velvet, one might say) they'd take that, cheerfully oblivious to the fact, as naturally one might expect them to be, that by taking six, they established a standard at which a girl who had to earn her own living simply couldn't live.

Rose knew exactly what would happen to her if she went to one of the big State Street department stores and asked for a job. Jane had been trying some experiments lately, and stating her results with convincing vivacity at their little dinners afterward. There was no thoroughfare there.

She knew too, what sort of life she'd have to face if she offered herself out in the West Side factory district as a cracker packer, a chocolate dipper, a glove stitcher; any of those things. You got a sort of training, of course, at any one of these trades. You learned to develop a certain uncanny miraculous speed and skill in some one small operation, as remorseless and unvaried as the coming into mesh and out again of two cogs in a pair of gears. But the very highest skill could just about be made to keep you alive, and it led to nothing else. You wore out your body and asphyxiated your soul.

Rose didn't mean to do that. She was holding both body and soul in trust. The penitential mood that had resulted from her talk with Portia was utterly gone. She wasn't looking for hurts. Deliberately to impose tortures on herself was as far from her intent as shirking any of the inevitable trials that should come to her in the course of the day's work. The only way she could see to a life of decent self-respecting independence lay through some sort of special training--business training, she thought. She'd begin by learning to be a stenographer--a cracking good stenographer. Miss Beach had begun that way. She had a real job.

Only, Rose had first to get a job that would pay for her training; and not only pay for it, but leave time for it; a problem which might have seemed like the problem of lifting yourself by your boot straps, if it hadn't been for Jimmy Wallace--Jimmy with his talk about chorus-girls.

The trouble with that profession, Jimmy had said, was that the indispensable assets in it were not industry, intelligence, ambitions, but a reasonably presentable pair of arms and legs (a good-looking face would surely come in handy too) and a rudimentary sense of rhythm.

Another demoralizing thing about it, he had said, was the fact that the work wasn't hard enough, except during rehearsal, to keep its votaries out of mischief.

When the notion first occurred to her that these statements of Jimmy's might some day have an interest for her that was personal rather than academic, she had dismissed it with a shrug of good-humored amusement.

It wasn't until her idea of leaving Rodney and going out and making a living and a life for herself had hardened into a fixed resolution, and she had begun serious consideration of ways and means, that she called it back into her mind. There was no use blinking the facts. The one marketable asset she would possess when she walked out of her husband's house, was simply--how she looked.

Well then, if that was all you had, there was no degradation in using it until you could make yourself the possessor of something else. And the merit of this particular sort of job, for her, lay precisely in the thing that Jimmy had cited as its chief disadvantage--it left you abundant leisure. You might occupy that leisure getting into mischief--no doubt most chorus-girls did. But there was nothing to prevent your using it to better advantage.

With this in mind, on the Sunday before Rose went away, she had studied the dramatic section of the morning paper with a good deal of care and was rewarded by finding among the news notes, an item referring to a new musical comedy that was to be produced at the Globe Theater immediately after the Christmas holidays. _The Girl Up-stairs_ was the title of it. It was spoken of as one of the regular Globe productions, so it was probable that Jimmy Wallace's experience with the production of an earlier number in the series would at least give her something to go by. The thing must be in rehearsal now.

Granted that she was going to be a chorus-girl for a while, she could hardly find a better place than one of the Globe productions to be one in. According to Jimmy Wallace, it was a decent enough little place, and yet it possessed the advantage of being spiritually as well as actually, west of Clark Street. Rodney's friends were less likely to go there, and so have a chance of recognizing her, than to any other theater in the city, barring of course the flagrantly and shamelessly vulgar ones of the purlieus.

Among her older friends of school and college days, the chances were of course worse. But even if she were seen on the stage by people who knew her, even though they were to say to each other that that girl looked surprisingly like Rose Aldrich, this would be a very different thing from full recognition. She would be well protected by the utter unlikelihood of her being in such a place; by the absence of anybody's knowledge that she had flown off at a tangent from the orbit of Rodney's world. Then, too, she'd be somewhat disguised no doubt, by make-up. Of course with all those considerations weighed at their full value, there remained a risk that she would be fully discovered and recognized. But it was a risk that couldn't be avoided, whatever she did.

She entertained for a while, the notion of taking Jimmy Wallace into her confidence--he had as many depositors of confidences on his books, as a savings bank, and he was just as safe. It was altogether likely that he could get her a job out of hand. He was still on the best of terms with the Globe people, and he was a really influential critic. But even if he didn't get her a job outright, he could at least tell her how to set about getting one for herself--where to go, whom to ask for, the right way to phrase her request, which makes such an enormous difference in things of that kind.

But she wasn't long in abandoning the notion of appealing to Jimmy at all. The corner-stone of her new adventure must be that she was doing things for herself; that she was through being helped, having ways smoothed for her, things done for her. If she owed her first job even indirectly to Jimmy, all the rest of her structure would be out of plumb. Whatever success she might have would be tainted by the misgiving that but for somebody else's help, she might have failed. Rose Stanton who had rented that three-dollar room was going to be beholden to nobody!

The news item in the paper gave her really all she needed. It told her that a production was in rehearsal and it mentioned the name of the director, John Galbraith, referring to him as one of the three most prominent musical-comedy directors in the country; imported from New York at vast expense, to make this production unique in the annals of the Globe, and so forth.

They hadn't rehearsed Jimmy's piece, she knew, in the theater itself, but in all sorts of queer out-of-the-way places--in theaters that happened for the moment to be "dark," in dance-halls; pretty much anywhere. This was because there was another show running at the time at the Globe. She had looked in the theater advertisements to see whether a show was running there now. Yes, there was. Well, that gave her her formula.

When she asked at the box office at the Globe Theater, where they were rehearsing _The Girl Up-stairs_ to-day, the nicely manicured young man inside, answered automatically, "North End Hall."

Evidently Jimmy Wallace couldn't have phrased the question better himself. But the quality of the voice that asked it had, even to his not very sensitive ear, an unaccustomed flavor. So, almost simultaneously with his answer, he looked up from his finger-nails and shot an inquiring glance through the grille.

What he saw betrayed him into an involuntary stare. He didn't mean to stare; he meant to be respectful. But he was surprised. Rose, in the plainest suit that she could hope would seem plausible to her servants for a traveling costume to California, an ulster and a little beaver hat with a quill in it, had no misgivings about looking the part of a potentially hard-working young woman renting a three-dollar room on North Clark Street and seeking employment in a musical-comedy chorus. A realization that her neat black seal dressing-case wasn't quite in the picture, helped to account for the landlady's puzzlement about her. But it hadn't been introduced in evidence here. And yet the young man behind the grille seemed as surprised as the landlady.

He repeated his answer to her question with the lubricant of a few more words and a fatuous sort of smile. "I believe they rehearse in the North End Hall this afternoon."

Rose couldn't help smiling a little herself. "I'm afraid," she said, "I'll have to ask where that is."

"Not at all," said the young man idiotically, and he told her the address; then cast about for a slip of paper to write it down on, racking his thimbleful of brains all the while to make out who she could be. She wasn't one of the principals in the company. They'd all reported and he hadn't heard that any of them was to be replaced.

"Oh, you needn't write it," said Rose. "I can remember, thank you." She gave him a pleasant sort of boyish nod that didn't classify at all with anything in his experience, and walked out of the lobby.

He stared after her almost resentfully, feeling all mussed up, somehow, and inadequate; as if here had been a situation that he had failed signally to make the most of. He sat there for the next half-hour gloomily thinking up things he might have said to her.

CHAPTER II

THE EVENING AND THE MORNING WERE THE FIRST DAY

With her umbrella over her shoulder, Rose set sail northward again through the rain, absurdly cheered; first by the fact that the opening skirmish had distinctly, though intangibly, gone her way; secondly by the small bit of luck that North End Hall would be, judging by its number on North Clark Street, not more than a block or two from her three-dollar room.

The sight of the entrance to it gave her a pang of misgiving. A pair of white painted doors opened from the street level upon the foot of a broadish stair which took you up rather suddenly; there was space enough between the foot of the stair and the doors for a ticket-window, but it was too small to be called a lobby; an arc lamp hung there though, and two more--all three were extinct--hung just outside. What gave the place its air of vulgarity, a suggestion of being the starting and finishing point for lewd, drink sodden revels, she couldn't determine. It did suggest this plainly. But, in the light of what Jimmy Wallace had told her, she didn't think it likely there'd be any reveling to speak of at rehearsal.

At the head of the stairway, tilted back in a kitchen chair beneath a single gas-jet whose light he was trying to make suffice for the perusal of a green newspaper, sat a man, under orders no doubt, to keep intruders away.

Rose cast about as she climbed for the sort of phrase that would convince him she wasn't an intruder. She would ask him, but in the manner of one who seeks a formal assurance merely, if this was where they were rehearsing _The Girl Up-stairs_. Three steps from the top, she changed her tactics, as a result of a glance at his unshaven face. The thing to do was to go by as if he weren't there at all--as if, for such as she, watchmen didn't exist. The rhythmic pounding of feet and the frayed chords from a worn-out piano, convinced her she was in the right place.

Her stratagem succeeded, but not without giving her a bad moment. The man glanced up and, though she felt he didn't return to his paper again, he made no attempt to stop her. But right before her was another pair of big white doors, closed with an effect of permanence--locked, she suspected. A narrower door to the left stood open, but over it was painted the disconcerting legend "Bar," flanked on either side, to make the matter explicit even to the unlearned, by pictorial representations of glasses of foaming beer. She hadn't time to deliberate over her choice. The watchman's eyes were boring into her back. If she chose wrong, or if she visibly hesitated, she knew she'd hear a voice say, "Here! Where you going!"

She caught a quick breath, turned to the left and walked steadily through the narrower door into the bar. It proved to be a deserted, shrouded, sinister-looking place, with an interminable high mahogany counter at one side, and with a lot of little iron tables placed by pairs, their tops together, so that half of them had their legs in the air. Its lights were fled, its garlands dead all right, but there wasn't anything poetic about it. However, there was another open door at the far end of the room, through which sounds and light came in. And the watchman hadn't interfered with her. Evidently she had chosen right.

She paused for a second steadying breath before she went through that farther door, her eyes starry with resolution, her cheeks, just for the moment, a little pale. If the comparison suggests itself to you of an early Christian maiden about to step out into an arena full of wild beasts, then you will have mistaken Rose. The arena was there, true enough. But she was stepping out into it with the intention of, like Androcles, taming the lion.

The room was hot and not well lighted--a huge square room with a very high ceiling. In the farther wall of it was a proscenium arch and a raised stage somewhat brighter than the room itself, though the stained brick wall at the back, in the absence of any scenery, absorbed a good deal of the light. On the stage, right and left, were two irregular groups of girls, with a few men, awkwardly, Rose thought, disposed among them. All were swaying a little to mark the rhythm of the music industriously pounded out by a sweaty young man at the piano--a swarthy, thick young man in his undershirt. There were a few more people, Rose was aware without exactly looking at any of them, sprawled in different parts of the hall, on sofas or cushioned window-seats.

It was all a little vague to her at first, because her attention was focused on a single figure--a compact, rather slender figure, and tall, Rose thought--of a man in a blue serge suit, who stood at the exact center of the stage and the extreme edge of the footlights. He was counting aloud the bars of the music--not beating time at all, nor yielding to the rhythm in any way; standing, on the contrary, rather tensely still. That was the quality about him, indeed, that riveted Rose's attention and held her as still as he was, in the doorway--an exhilarating sort of intensity that had communicated itself to the swaying groups on the stage. You could tell from the way he counted that something was gathering itself up, getting ready to happen. "Three ...

Four ... Five ... Six ... Seven ... _Now!_" he shouted on the eighth bar, and with the word, one of the groups transformed itself. One of the men bowed to one of the girls and began waltzing with her; another couple formed, then another.

Rose watched breathlessly, hoping the maneuver wouldn't go wrong;--for no reason in the world but that the man, there at the footlights, was so tautly determined that it shouldn't.

Determination triumphed. The number was concluded to John Galbraith's evident satisfaction. "Very good," he said. "If you'll all do exactly what you did that time from now on, I'll not complain." Without a pause he went on, "Everybody on the stage--big girls--all the big girls!" And, to the young man at the piano, "We'll do _Afternoon Tea_." There was a momentary pause then, filled with subdued chatter, while the girls and men re-alined themselves for the new number--a pause taken advantage of by an exceedingly blond young man to scramble up on the stage and make a few remarks to the director. He was the musical director, Rose found out afterward. Galbraith, to judge from his attitude, gave his colleague's remarks about twenty-five per cent. of his attention, keeping his eye all the while on the chorus, to see that they got their initial formation correctly. Rose looked them over, too. The girls weren't, on an average, extravagantly beautiful, though, with the added charm of make-up allowed for, there were no doubt many the audiences would consider so. What struck Rose most emphatically about them, was their youth and spirit. How long they had been rehearsing this afternoon she didn't know. But now, when they might have gone slack and silent, they pranced and giggled instead and showed a disposition to lark about, which evidently would have carried them a good deal further but for the restraining presence of the director. They were dressed in pretty much anything that would allow perfect freedom to their bodies; especially their arms and legs; bathing suits mostly, or middy-blouses and bloomers. Rose noted this with satisfaction. Her old university gymnasium costume would do perfectly. Anything, apparently, would do, because as her eye adjusted itself to details, she discovered romper suits, pinafores, chemises, overalls--all equally taken for granted.

There weren't nearly so many chorus men as girls. She couldn't be sure just how many there were, because they couldn't be singled out. As they wore no distinctly working costume, merely took off their coats, waistcoats and collars, they weren't distinguishable from most of the staff, who, with the exception of the director, garbed themselves likewise.

Galbraith dismissed the musical director with a nod, struck his hands together for silence, and scrutinized the now motionless group on the stage.

"We're one shy," he said. "Who's missing?" And then answered his own question: "Grant!" He wheeled around and his eyes searched the hall.