"We've been rehearsing this piece two weeks," he said presently, looking away from her when he began to talk, "and I couldn't take any one into the chorus now whom I'd have to teach the rudiments of dancing to. I must have people who can do what I tell them. That's why a test was necessary. Also, from now on, it would be a serious thing to lose anybody out of the chorus. I couldn't take anybody who had come down here--for a lark."

"It's not a lark to me," said Rose.

Now he looked around at her again. "I know it isn't," he said. "But I thought when you first came in here, that it was."

With that, Rose understood the whole thing. It was evidently a fact that despite the plain little suit, the beaver hat, the rough ulster she was wearing, she didn't look like the sort of girl who had to rely on getting a job in the chorus for keeping a roof over her head. Looks, speech, manner--everything segregated her from the type. It was all obvious enough, only Rose hadn't happened to think of it. It accounted, of course, for the rather odd way in which the landlady, the ticket-seller at the Globe, and meek little Mr. Quan, the assistant stage manager, all had looked at her, as at some one they couldn't classify. John Galbraith, out of a wider experience of life, had classified her, or thought he had, as a well-bred young girl who, in a moment of pique, or mischief, had decided it would be fun to go on the stage. The test he had applied wasn't, from that point of view, unnecessarily cruel. The girl he had taken her for, would, on being ordered to repeat that grotesque bit of vulgarity of his, have drawn her dignity about her like a cloak, and gone back in a chastened spirit to the world where she belonged.

A gorgeous apparition came sweeping by them just now, on a line from the dressing-room to the door--a figure that, with regal deliberation, was closing a blue broadcloth coat, trimmed with sable, over an authentic Callot frock. The Georgette hat on top of it was one that Rose had last seen in a Michigan Avenue shop. She had amused herself by trying to vizualize the sort of person who ought to buy it. It had found its proper buyer at last--fulfilled its destiny.

"Oh, Grant!" said John Galbraith.

The queenly creature stopped short and Rose recognized her with a jump, as the sulky chorus-girl. Dressed like this, her twenty pounds of surplus fat didn't show.

Galbraith walked over to her. "I shan't need you any more, Grant." He spoke in a quiet impersonal sort of way, but his voice had, as always, a good deal of carrying power. "It's hardly worth your while trying to work, I suppose, when you're so prosperous as this. And it isn't worth my while to have you soldiering. You needn't report again."

He nodded not unamiably, and turned away. Evidently she had ceased to exist for him as completely as the duchess. She glared after him and called out in a hoarse throaty voice, "Thank Gawd I don't _have_ to work for you."

He'd come back to Rose again by this time, and she saw him smile. "When you do it," he said over his shoulder, "thank Him for me too." Then to Rose: "She's a valuable girl; had lots of experience; good-looking; audiences like her. I'm giving you her place because as long as she's got those clothes and the use of a limousine, she won't get down to business. I'd rather have a green recruit who will. I'm hiring you because I think you will be able to understand that what you feel like doing isn't important and that what I tell you to do is. The next rehearsal is at a quarter to eight to-night. Give your name and address to Mr. Quan before you go. By the way, what is your name?"

"Rose Stanton," she said. "But ..." She had to follow him a step or two because he had already turned away. "But, may I give some other name than that to Mr. Quan?" He frowned a little dubiously and asked her how old she was. And even when she told him twenty-two, he didn't look altogether reassured.

"That's the truth, is it? I mean, there's nobody who can come down here about three days before we open and call me a kidnaper, and lead you away by the ear?"

"No," said Rose gravely, "there's no one who'll do that."

"Very good," he said. "Tell Quan any name you like."

The name she did tell him was Doris Dane.

It was a quarter to seven when she came out through the white doors into North Clark Street. The thing that woke her out of a sort of daze as she trudged along toward her room in the unrelenting rain was a pleasurable smell of fried onions; whereupon she realized that she was legitimately and magnificently hungry. In any other condition, the dingy little lunch-room she presently turned into, would hardly have invited her. But the spots on the frayed starchy table-cloth, the streakiness of the glasses, the necessity of polishing knife and fork upon her damp napkin, couldn't prevent her doing ample justice to a small thick platter of ham and eggs, and a plate of thicker wheat-cakes.

It occurred to her as she finished, that a quarter to eight probably meant the hour at which the rehearsal was to begin. She'd have to be back at the hail at least fifteen minutes earlier, in order to be dressed and ready. She had no time to waste; would even have to hurry a little.

She didn't try to explore for the reason why this discovery pleased her so much. It was enough that it did. She flew along through the rain to her tunnel, charged up the narrow stair, and in the unlighted corridor outside her room, collided with her trunk. Well, it was lucky it had come anyway. She tugged it into her room after she had lighted the gas.

You might have seen, if you had been there to see, just a momentary hesitation after she'd got her trunk key out of her purse before she unlocked it. It was a sort of Jack-in-the-box, that trunk. Would the emotions with which she'd packed it, spring out and clutch her as she released the hasp? The saving factor in the situation was that it was a quarter past seven. In fifteen minutes she must be back at North End Hall, getting ready to go to work at her job. Suppose she hadn't found a job this afternoon? The thought turned her giddy.

She plunged into her trunk, rummaged out a middy-blouse, a pair of black silk bloomers, and her gymnasium sneakers, rolled them all together in a bundle, got into her rubbers and her ulster again, and--I'm afraid there is no other word for it--fled.

She was one of the first of the chorus to reach the hail and she had nearly finished putting on her working clothes before the rest of them came pelting in. But she didn't get out quickly enough to miss the sensation that was exciting them all--the news that Grant had been dropped. A few of them were indignant; the rest merely curious. The indignant ones allowed themselves a license in the expression of this feeling that positively staggered Rose; made use in a quite matter-of-fact way of words she had supposed even a drunken truck-man would have attempted to refrain from in the presence of a woman. She made a discovery afterward, that there were many girls in the chorus who never talked like that; and among those who did, the further distinction between those who used vile language casually, or even jocularly, and those who were driven to it only by anger. But for these first few minutes in the dressing-room, she felt as if she had blundered into some foul pit abysmally below the lowest level of decency.

One of the girls advanced the theory that Grant hadn't finally been dropped; it was absurd that she should be. She was one of the most popular chorus-girls in Chicago. The director was merely trying to scare her into doing better work for him. She'd come back, all right. She had reasons of her own, this girl intimated, for wanting to work, despite the possession of French clothes and the use of a limousine. Her "friend," it seemed, needed to be taught some sort of lesson. Grant would come around before to-morrow night, and eat enough humble pie to induce Galbraith to take her back.

If this theory were sound, and it had a dreadful plausibility to Rose, her only chance for keeping her job would be to do as well as Grant could do, to-night, in this very first rehearsal; and she went out on the stage in a perfect agony of determination. She must see everything, hear everything; put all she knew and every ounce of energy she had, into the endeavor to make John Galbraith forget that she was a recruit at all.

The intensity of this preoccupation was a wonderful protection to her.

It kept away the sick disgust that had threatened her in the dressing-room; prevented her even glancing ahead to a future that would, had she taken to guessing about it, utterly have overwhelmed her. The intensely illuminated present instant kept her mind focused to its sharpest edge.

It is true that before she had been working fifteen minutes, she had forgotten all about Grant and the possibility of her return. She'd even forgotten her resolution not to let John Galbraith remember she was a recruit. Indeed, she had forgotten she was a recruit. She was nothing at all but just a reflection of his will. She'd felt that quality strongly in him even behind his back during the afternoon rehearsal. Now, on the stage in front of him, she was completely possessed by it.

She didn't know she was tired, panting, wet all over with sweat. Really, of course, she was pretty soft, judged by her own athletic standards.

She hadn't done anything so physically exacting as this for over a year.

But she had the illusion that she wasn't _doing_ anything now; that she was just a passive plastic thing, tossed, flung, swirled about by the driving power of the director's will. It wouldn't have surprised her if the chairs had danced for him.

It couldn't of course have occurred to her that she was producing her own effect on the director; she couldn't have surmised that he was driving his rehearsal at a faster pace and with a renewed energy and fire because of the presence, there in the ranks of his chorus, of a glowing, thrilling creature who devoured his intentions half formed, met them with a blue spark across the poles of their two minds.

She realized, when the rehearsal was over, that it had gone well and that it couldn't have gone so if her own part had been done badly. She hesitated a moment after he'd finally dismissed them with a nod, and an, "Eleven o'clock to-morrow morning, everybody," from a previously formed intention of asking him if she'd do. But she felt, somehow, that such a question would be foolish and unnecessary.

He had marked her hesitation and shot her a look that she felt followed her as she walked off, and she heard him say to the world in general and in a heartfelt sort of way, "Good God!" But she didn't know that it was the highest encomium he was capable of, nor that it was addressed to her.

She carried away, however, a glow that saw her back to her room, and through the processes of unpacking and getting ready for bed, though it faded swiftly during the last of these. But when the last thing that she could think of to do had been done, when there was no other pretext, even after a desperate search for one, that could be used to postpone turning out her light and getting into bed, she had to confess to herself that she was afraid to do it. And with that confession, the whole pack of hobgoblin terrors she had kept at bay so valiantly since shutting her husband's door behind her, were upon her back.

Here she was, Rose Aldrich, in a three-dollar-a-week room on North Clark Street, having deserted her husband and her babies--a loving honest husband, and a pair of helpless babies not yet three months old--to become a member of the chorus in a show called _The Girl Up-stairs!_ Was there a human being in the world, except herself, who would not, as the most charitable of possible explanations, assume her to be mad? Could she herself, seeing her act cut out in silhouette like that, be sure she wasn't mad? Hysterical anyway, the victim of her own rashly encouraged fancies, just as Rodney had so often declared she was? Oughtn't she to have let James Randolph explore the subconscious part of her mind and find the crack there must be in it, that could have driven her to a crazy act like this?

It didn't matter now. She couldn't go back. She never could go back after the things she had said to Rodney, until she had made good those fantastic theories of hers. Probably he wouldn't want her to come back even then. He'd find out where she was of course--what she was doing.

Why had she been such a fool, going away, as not to have gone far enough to be safe? He'd feel that she'd disgraced him. Any man would. And he'd never forgive her. He'd divorce her, perhaps. He'd have a right to, if she stayed away long enough. And, without her there, with nothing of her but memories--tormenting memories, he'd perhaps fall in love with some one else--marry some one else. And her two babies would call that unknown some one "mother." She must have been crazy! She'd thought she didn't love them. That had been a delusion anyway. Her heart ached for them now--an actual physical ache that almost made her cry out. And for Rodney himself, for his big strong arms around her! Would she ever feel them again?

She told herself this was a nightmare--something to be fought off, kept at bay. But how did that help her now, when the armor must be laid aside? Sometime or other she must turn out that light and lie down in that bed, defenseless. She had never in her life asked more of her courage than when, at last, she did that thing. There were nine hours then ahead of her before eleven o'clock and the next rehearsal.

CHAPTER III

ROSE KEEPS THE PATH

Rose rehearsed twice a day for a solid week without forming the faintest conception of who "the girl" was or why she was "the girl up-stairs."

She didn't know what sort of scene it was for instance that they burst in on through the space marked by two of the little folding chairs brought up from the floor of the dance-hall for the purpose. The group of iron tables borrowed from the bar and set solidly together in the upper right-hand corner of the stage whenever they rehearsed a certain one of their song numbers, might with equal plausibility represent a mountain in Arizona, the front veranda of a house or a banquet table in the gilded dining-hall of some licentious multi-millionaire. They got up on the insecure thing and tried to dance; that was all she knew.

During the entire period, and for that matter, right up to the opening night she never saw a bar of music except what stood on the piano rack, nor a written word of the lyrics she was supposed to sing. Rose couldn't sing very much. She had a rather timorous, throaty little contralto that contrasted oddly with the fine free thrill of her speaking voice. But nobody had asked her what her voice was, nor indeed, whether she could sing at all. She picked up the tunes quickly enough, by ear, but the words she was always a little uncertain about.

It all seemed too utterly haphazard to be possible, but Rose decided not to ask any of the authorities about this, because, while the possibility of Grant's return dangled over her head, she didn't want to remind anybody how green she was. But she finally questioned one of her colleagues in the chorus about it, and was told that back at the beginning of things, they had had their voices tried by the musical director, who had conducted three or four music rehearsals before John Galbraith arrived. They had never had any music to sing from but there had been half a dozen mimeograph copies of the words to the songs, which the girls had put their heads together over in groups of three or four, and more or less learned. What had become of this dope, and whether it was still available for Rose in case she were animated by a purely supererogatory desire to study it, the girl didn't know.

She was a pale-haired girl, whom Rose thought she had heard addressed as Larson, and she had emerged rather slowly as an individual personality, out of the ruck of the chorus; a fact in her favor, really, because the girls who had first driven themselves home to Rose through the shell of her intense preoccupation with doing what John Galbraith wanted, had been the vividly and viciously objectionable ones. The thing that had prompted her to sit down beside Larson and, with this question about how one learned the words to the songs, take her first real step toward an acquaintance, was an absence of any strong dislike, rather than the presence of a real attraction.

She made a surprising discovery when the girl, with a friendly pat on the sofa beside her, for an invitation to her to sit down, began answering her question. She was a real beauty. Or, more accurately, she possessed the constituent qualities of beauty. She was pure English eighteenth century; might have stepped down out of a Gainsborough portrait. Dressed right, and made up a little, with her effects legitimately heightened (and warned not to speak), she could have gone to the Charity Ball as the Honorable Mrs. Graham, and Bertie Willis would have gone mad about her. Only you had to look twice at her to perceive that this was so; and what she lacked was just the unanalyzable quality that makes one look twice.

Her speaking voice would have driven Bertie mad, too--foaming, biting mad. It was disconcertingly loud, in the first place, and it came out upon the promontories of speech with a flat whang that fairly made you jump. Its undulations of pitch gave you something the same sensation as riding rapidly over a worn-out asphalt pavement in a five-hundred-dollar automobile; unforeseen springs into the air, descents into unexpected pits. Her grammar wasn't flagrantly bad, though it had, rather pitiably, a touch of the genteel about it. But now, when she spoke to Rose, and with the lassitude of fatigue in her voice besides, Rose heard something friendly about it.

"I don't know what you should worry about any of that stuff for," she said. "How you sing or what you sing don't make much difference."

Rose admitted that it didn't seem to. "But you see," she said (she hadn't had a human soul to talk to for more than a week and she had to make a friend of somebody); "you see, I've just got to keep this job.

And if every little helps, as they say, perhaps that would."

The girl looked at her oddly, almost suspiciously, as if for a moment she had doubted whether Rose had spoken in good faith. "You've got as good a chance of losing your job," she said, "as Galbraith has of losing his."

"I don't worry about it," said Rose, "when I'm up there on the stage at work. It's too exciting. And then, I feel somehow that it's going all right. But early in the morning, I get to imagining all sorts of things.

He's so terribly sudden. The girl whose place I got,--she hadn't any warning, you know. It just happened."