The men principals--this was rather a surprise to Rose--weren't nearly so pleasant nor so friendly. Most of them professed to be totally unaware of her existence and the one or two who showed an awareness--Freddy France, who played the comic detective, was chief of these offenders--did it in a way that brought the fighting blood into her cheeks.

My astronomical figure for the expression of Rose's rise in her profession is, in one important particular, misleading. There was nothing precalculable about it, as there is about the solemn swing of the stars. The impetus and direction of Rose's career derived from two incidents that might just as well not have happened--two of the flukiest of small chances.

The first of these chances concerned itself with Olga Larson and her bad voice. Olga, as I think I have told you, was one of the sextette. And, oddly enough, she owed her membership in this little group of quasi principals, to her voice and nothing else. Because it was a bad voice only when she talked. When she sang, it had a gorgeous thrilling ring to it that made Patricia Devereux, when she heard it, clench her hands and narrow her eyes. She'd never been taught what to do with it, but then, for what Galbraith wanted of her she needed no teaching. Her ear was infallible; let her hear a tune once and she could reproduce it accurately, squarely up to time, squarely, always, in the middle of the pitch. When she opened her rather dainty-looking mouth and sang, she could give you across the footlights the impression that at least four first-class sopranos were going uncommon strong. She hadn't a salient or commonplace enough sort of beauty to have singled her out from the chorus and she was no better a dancer than passable. But none of the girls who would be picked out by a committee of automobile salesmen as the prettiest and the best dancers in the chorus could sing a note, and the sextette would have been dumb without her voice.

It was natural enough that Patricia didn't like it. She owed her own position as a leading light-opera soprano to the cultivation to its highest possible perfection of a distinctly second-rate voice, to a precise knowledge of its limitations and to a most scrupulous economy in its effects. Inevitably, then, the raw splendors that Olga Larson dispensed so prodigally gave Patricia the creeps.

Inevitably, too, without any conscious malice about it, she made up her clear, hard little mind the moment she heard Olga talk, that she was utterly impossible for the sextette. "Really, my dear man," she told Galbraith after the first rehearsal, "you'll have to find some one else.

American audiences will stand a good deal, I know, in the way of atrocious speech, but positively she'll be hooted. They'll all sound frightful enough, especially because that Dane girl, if that's her name, talks like a lady, but this one ...!" She gave a cruelly adequate little imitation of Olga's delivery of one of her lines. "Like some one who doesn't know how, trying to play the slide trombone," she commented.

Galbraith couldn't pretend that she exaggerated the horrors of it, but explained why the girl was indispensable. The explanation didn't please Patricia any too well, either.

"Sing!" she cried hotly. "But she sings detestably!"

"No doubt," Galbraith admitted, "but she makes a great big noise always on the right note, and that's what that bunch of penny whistlers can't do without. Give her a little time," he concluded diplomatically, "and I'll try to teach her."

"It can't be taught," said Patricia. "That's too much even for you."

So it happened that when Rose came out of her own nightmare, got her breath and found leisure to look around, she found some one else whose troubles weren't so transitory. The little scene in the first act, between Sylvia and the sextette, was held up again and again, endlessly, it seemed to Rose,--and what must it have seemed to the poor victim?--while Galbraith bellowed Larson's lines after her, sometimes in grotesque imitation of her own inflections, sometimes in what was meant as a pattern for her to follow. The girl whose ear was so wonderfully sensitive to pitch and rhythm, was simply deaf, it seemed, to the subtleties of inflection. She reduced Galbraith to helpless wrath, in her panic, by mistaking now and again, his imitations for his models.

The chorus tittered; the spectators suffocated their guffaws as well as they could. Patricia grew more and more acutely and infuriatingly ironic all the while.

Evidently Galbraith didn't mean to be a brute about it. He began every one of these tussles to improve her reading of a line, with a gentleness that would have done credit to a kinder-gartener. But, after three attempts, each more ominously gentle and deliberate than the last, his temper would suddenly fly all to pieces. "--No--no--no!" he would roar at her, and the similes his exasperation would supply him with, for a description of what her speech was like, were as numerous as the acids in a chemical laboratory; and they all bit and burned just as hard.

Rose looked on with rather tepid feelings. She sympathized with Galbraith on the whole. The poor man was doing his best; and the girl, queerly, didn't seem to care. She confronted him in a sort of stockish stupidity, saying her lines, when he told her to try again, with the same frightful whang he was doing his best to correct, so that he was justified, Rose felt, in accusing her of not trying, or even listening to him.

It was in the dressing-room one night, after one of these rehearsals, that she caught a different view of the situation. She sat down on a bench to unlace her shoes and looked straight into Olga Larson's face--a face sunken with a despair that turned Rose cold all over. The tearless tragic eyes were staring, without recognition, straight into Rose's own.

It must be with faces like this that people mounted the rails on the high bridge in Lincoln Park, intent on leaving a world that had become intolerable. Packed in all around her in the inadequate dressing-room, the other girls were chattering, squealing, scrambling into their clothes, as unaware of her tense motionless figure, as if it had been a mere inanimate lump. She couldn't have been more alone if she had been sitting out on the rock of Juan Fernandez.

Rose invented various pretexts to delay her own dressing until the other girls were gone. She could no more have abandoned that hopeless creature there, than she could have left a person drowning. When they had the room to themselves, she sat down on the bench beside her.

"You're all right," she said, feeling rather embarrassed and inadequate and not knowing just how to begin. "I'm going to help you."

"It's always like this," the girl said. "It's no use. He'll put me back in the chorus again."

"Not if I can help it," Rose said. "But the first thing to do is to put on your clothes. Then we'll go out and get something to eat."

Even that little beginning involved a struggle--a conscious exertion of all the power Rose possessed. She learned, for the first time, what the weight of an immense melancholy inertia like that can be. The girl was like one paralyzed. She was willing enough to talk. She told Rose the whole story of her life; not as one making confidences to a friend; rather with the curious detachment of a melancholy spectator discussing an unfortunate life she had no concern with.

She knew how good her voice was, and, equally, how badly it needed training. She'd had, always, a passionate desire to sing and a belief in her possibilities. If she could get a chance, she could succeed. She'd undergone heartbreaking privations, trying to save money enough out of her earnings at one form of toil after another, to take lessons. But, repeatedly, these small savings had, by some disaster, been swept away: stolen once, by a worthless older brother; absorbed on another occasion by her mother's fatal illness. Two years ago she had drifted into the chorus, but had been altogether unlucky in her various ventures. She wasn't naturally graceful--had been slow learning to dance. Again and again, she'd been dropped at the end of three or four weeks of rehearsal (gratuitous of course) and seen another girl put in her place. When this hadn't happened, the shows she had been in had failed after a few weeks'

life.

When Galbraith had put her into the sextette in _The Girl Up-stairs_, a hope, just about dead, had been awakened. She'd at last learned to dance well enough to escape censure and she had seen for herself how indispensable her singing voice was to the group. And then it had appeared she'd have to talk! And, inexplicably to herself, her talking wasn't right. The thing had just been another mirage. It was hopeless.

Galbraith would put her back into the chorus--drop her, likely enough, altogether.

The thing that at first exasperated Rose and later, as she came vaguely to understand it, aroused both her pity and her determination, was the girl's strange, dully fatalistic acquiescence in it all. The sort of circumstances that in Rose herself set the blood drumming through her arteries, keyed her will to the very highest pitch, quickened her brain, made her feel in some inexplicable way, confident and irresistible, laid on this girl a paralyzing hand. It wasn't her fault that she didn't meet her difficulties half-way with a vicious, driving offensive--rout them, demoralize them. It was her tragedy.

"All right," Rose apostrophized them grimly. "This time you're up against me."

"Look here!" she said to Olga, when the story was told (this was across the table in the dingy lunch-room where, as Doris Dane, she had had her first meal, and most of her subsequent ones), "look here, and listen to what I'm going to tell you. I know what I'm talking about. You're going to learn to say your lines before to-morrow's rehearsal, so that Mr. ...

So that Galbraith won't stop you once." (This was a trick of speech that came hard to Rose, but she was gradually learning it.) "We're going up to my room now, and I'm going to teach you. We've got lots of time.

Rehearsal to-morrow isn't till twelve o'clock. You're going to stay in the sextette, and when the piece opens, you're going to make a hit."

She hesitated a moment, then added in the same blunt matter-of-fact way, "You're one of the most beautiful women in Chicago. Did you know that?

Dressed right and with your hair done right, you could make them stare.

Have you finished your coffee? Then come along. Here! Give me your part.

You don't want to lose it."

For the girl, pitiably, almost ludicrously, was staring at Rose in a sort of somnambulistic daze. She hadn't been hypnotized, but she might about as well have been, for any real resistance her mind, or her will, could offer to her new friend's vibrant confidence.

She went with Rose up to the little three-dollar room. Rose put her into a chair, sat down opposite her, took the first phrase of her first speech, and said it very slowly, very quietly, half a dozen times. That was at half past eleven o'clock at night. By midnight, Olga could say those first three words, if not to Rose's complete satisfaction, at least a lot better. She went on and finished the sentence. They worked straight through the night, except that two or three times the girl broke down; said it was hopeless. She got up once and said that she was going home, whereupon Rose locked the door and put the key in her stocking. She sulked once, and for fifteen minutes wouldn't say a word.

But by seven o'clock in the morning, when they went back to the lunch-room and ate an enormous breakfast, Olga's sluggish blood was fired at last. It was a profane thought, but you _could_ take the Fatal Sisters by the hair and coerce a change in the pattern they were weaving.

And Rose, by that time, by the plain brute force of necessity, was a teacher of phonetics. She'd discovered how she made sounds herself and had, with the aid of a hand mirror, developed a rough-and-ready technique for demonstrating how it was done. She remembered, with bitter regret, a course she had dozed through at the university, dreaming about the half-back, which, had she only listened to the professor instead, would be doing her solid service now. Had there been other courses like that, she wondered vaguely? Had the education she had spent fifteen years or so on an actual relation to life after all? It was a startling idea.

She walked Olga out to the park and back at seven-thirty, and at eight they were up in her room again. They raided the delicatessen at eleven o'clock, and made an exiguous meal on the plunder. And at twelve, husky of voice, but indomitable of mind, they, with the others, confronted Galbraith upon the stage in North End Hall.

"Do you suppose," Olga said during the preliminary bustle of getting started, "that he's put any one else in my part already?"

It was a fear Rose had entertained, but had avoided suggesting to her pupil.

"I don't believe so," she said. "If he has, I'll talk to him."

"No, you won't!" said Olga. "I'll talk to him myself."

There was a ring to that decision that did Rose's heart good. It took a long time to get that northern blood on fire, but when you did, you could count on its not going cold again overnight.

It got pretty exciting of course, as the scene between Sylvia and the sextette drew near, and when it came, Rose could hardly manage her own first line--hung over it a second, indeed, before she could make her voice work at all, and drew a sharp look of inquiry from Galbraith. But on Olga's first cue, her line was spoken with no hesitation at all, and in tone, pitch and inflection, it was almost a phonographic copy of the voice that had served it for a model.

There was a solid two seconds of silence. For once in her life Patricia Devereux had missed a cue!

John Galbraith had been an acrobat as well as a dancer, and he was quick on his feet. He had just turned, unexpectedly, an intellectual somersault, but he landed cleanly and without a stagger. "Come, Miss Devereux," he said, "that's your line." And the scene went on.

But when, about four o'clock that afternoon, the rehearsal was over, Galbraith called Olga out to him and allowed himself a long incredulous stare at her. "Will you tell me, Larson," he asked, "why in the name of Heaven, if you could do that, you didn't do it yesterday?"

"I couldn't do it yesterday," she said. "Dana taught me."

"Taught you!" he echoed. "Beginning after last night's rehearsal?...

Dane!" he called to Rose, who had been watching a little anxiously to see what would happen.

"You've learned it very well indeed," he said with a nod of dismissal to Olga, as Rose came up. "Don't try to change it. Stick to what you've got."

Then, to Rosa, "Larson tells me you taught her. How did you do it?"

"Why, I just--taught her," said Rosa. "I showed her how I said each line, and I kept on showing her until she could do it."

"How long did it take you--all night?"

"All the time there's been since last rehearsal," said Rosa, "except for three meals."