He was in focus now, there could he no doubt of that. But it didn't occur to him that it was the director who was in focus, not the man.

The fact was that in evoking the director she'd banished the man--a triumph she wasn't to realize the importance of until a good deal later.

"Well, then, look here," he said. "I've an idea that I could use you to good advantage as a sort of personal assistant. There'll be a good deal of work just of the sort you did with the sextette, teaching people to talk and move about like the sort of folk they're supposed to represent.

That's coming in more and more in musical comedies, the use of the chorus as real people in the story--accounting for their exits and entrances. It would be done more if we could teach chorus people to act human. Well, you can do that better than I; that's the plain truth. And then I think after you'd got my idea of a dance number you could probably rehearse it yourself, take some of that routine off my hands.

Under this new contract of mine, that I expect to sign in a day or two, I'll simply have to have somebody. And then, of course, there's the costuming. That's a great game, and I've a notion, though of course I haven't a great deal to go by, that you could swing it. I think you've a talent for it.

"There you are! The job will be paid from the first a great deal better than what you've got here. And the costuming end of it, if you succeed, would run to real money. Well, how about it?"

"But," said Rose a little breathlessly--"but don't I have to stay here with _The Girl Up-stairs_? I couldn't just leave, could I?"

"Oh, I shan't be ready for you just yet anyway," he said. "I'll write when I am and by that time you'll be perfectly free to give them your two weeks' notice. By the way, haven't you some other address than care of the theater--a permanent address somewhere?"

"Care of Miss Portia Stanton," she told him, and as he got out his card and wrote it down, she added the California address. It recalled to his mind that she had told him her name was Rose Stanton on the day he had given her a job, and the memory diverted him for a moment. Then he pulled himself back.

"They'll be annoyed, of course--Goldsmith and Block. But, after all, you've given them more than their money's worth already. Well--will you come if I write?"

"It seems to be too wonderful to be true," she said. "Yes, I'll come, of course."

He sat there gazing at her in a sort of fascination. Because she was fairly lambent with the wonder of it. Her eyes were starry, her lips a little parted, and she was so still she seemed not even to be breathing.

But the eyes weren't looking at him. Another vision filled them. The vision--oh, he was sure of it now!--of that "only one," whoever he was, that mattered.

He thrust back his chair with an abruptness that startled her out of her reverie, and the action, rough as it was, wasn't violent enough to satisfy the sudden exasperation that seized him. If he could have smashed the caraffe or something ...

"I won't keep you any longer," he said. "I'll have them get a taxi and send you home."

She said she didn't want a taxi. If he'd just walk over with her to a Clark Street car ... And she thanked him for everything, including the supper. But all the time he could see her trying, with a perplexity almost pathetic, to discover what she had done to change his manner again like that.

He was thoroughly contrite about it, and he did his best to recover an appearance of friendly good will. He didn't demur to her wish to be put on a car, and at the crossing where they waited for it, after an almost silent walk, he did manage to shake hands and wish her luck and tell her she'd hear from him soon, in a way that he felt reassured her.

But he kicked his way to the curb after the car had carried her off, and marched to his hotel in a sort of baffled fury. He didn't know exactly what had gone wrong about the evening. He couldn't, in phrases, tell himself just what it was he'd wanted. But he did know, with a perfectly abysmal conviction, that he was a fool!

CHAPTER X

THE VOICE OF THE WORLD

If you were to accost the average layman, especially the layman who has, at one time or another, found his personal affairs, or those of his friends, casually illuminated by the straying search-light of newspaper notoriety, and put this hypothetical question to him: What chance would there be that a young married woman, who, in a social sense, really "belonged," could leave her husband for a musical-comedy chorus in the city he lived in, and escape having the fact chronicled in the daily press?--that layman would tell you that there was simply no chance at all. But if you were to put the same question to a person expert in the science of publicity--to an alumnus of the local room of any big city daily, you'd get a very different answer. Because your expert knows how many good stories there are that never get into the papers. He allows for the element of luck; he knows how vitally important it is that the right person should become aware of the fact at exactly the right time, in order that a simple happening may be converted into news.

Rose's "escapade"--that's how it would have been described--didn't get into the papers. Jimmy Wallace, of course, before the bar of his own conscience, stood convicted of high treason. There was no use arguing with himself that he was hired as a critic and not as a reporter. For, just as it is the doctor's duty to prolong, if possible, the life of his patient, or the lawyer's duty to defend his client, so it is the duty of every man who writes for a newspaper, to turn himself into a reporter when a story breaks under his eye. Jimmy ought that very night as soon as he had made sure of his facts, to have left a note on his city editor's desk informing him that Mrs. Rodney Aldrich was a member of the chorus in the new Globe show.

He didn't do it, even though he knew that a more troublesome accuser than his own conscience--namely, the city editor himself--would confront him, in case any of his colleagues on the other papers had happened to recognize her and, dutifully, had turned the story in. He read the other papers for the next twenty-four hours, rather more carefully than usual, and then with a sigh of relief, told his conscience to go to the devil.

It was a well trained, obedient conscience, and it subsided meekly.

But his curiosity was neither meek nor accustomed to having its liberties interfered with, and it declined to leave the problem alone.

Problem! It was a whole nest of problems. If you isolated one and worked out a tolerably satisfactory answer to it, you discovered that this answer made all the rest more fantastically impossible of solution than before. It actually began to cost him sleep! What made it harder to bear, of course, was the tantalizing possibility of finding out something by dropping in at the Globe during a performance, wandering back on the stage, where he was always perfectly welcome, going up and speaking to her and--seeing what happened. Something more or less illuminating would have to happen. Because, even in the extremely improbable case of her pretending she didn't know him, he'd then have something to go on. He dismissed this temptation as often as it showed its face around the corner of the door of his mind--dismissed it with objurgations. But it was a persistent temptation and it wouldn't stay away.

It was a real relief to him when Violet Williamson telephoned to him one day and asked him to come out to dinner. There'd be no one but herself and John, she said, and he needn't dress unless he liked. She'd been in New York for a fortnight and had only been back two days. He mustn't fail to come. There was a sort of suppressed excitement about Violet's voice over the telephone, which led him to suspect she might be able to throw some light on the enigma.

But light, it appeared, was what John and Violet wanted from him.

They were both in the library when he came in, and after the barest preliminaries in the way of greetings and cigarettes, and the swiftest summary of her visit to New York ("I stayed just long enough to begin being not quite so furious with John for not taking me there to live,") Violet made a little silence, visibly lighted her bomb, and threw it.

"John and I went to the Globe last night to see _The Girl Up-stairs_,"

she said.

Jimmy carried his cocktail over to the fire, drew sharply on his cigarette to get it evenly lighted, and by that time had decided on his line.

"That's an amazing resemblance, isn't it?" he said.

"Resemblance fiddle-dee-dee!" said Violet.

John Williamson hunched himself around in his chair. "Well, you know,"

he protested to his wife, "that's the way I dope it out myself."

"Oh, _you!_" she said, with good-natured contempt. "You think you think so. Because you've always been wild about Rose ever since Rodney married her, you just won't let yourself think anything else. But Jimmy here, doesn't even think he thinks so. He knows better."

"They're the limit, aren't they?" said John in rueful appeal to his guest. "They not only know what you think, but what you think you think!

It's a marvelous thing--feminine intuition."

"'Intuition,' nothing!" said Violet. Then she rounded on Jimmy.

"How much have you found out about her--this girl with the 'astonishing resemblance'?"

"Not very much," Jimmy confessed. "According to the program, her name is Doris Dane. I did ask Block about her. He's one of the owners of the piece. But he couldn't tell me very much. She's from out of town, he thinks, and he said something about her being a dressmaker. She did some work for them on the costumes. And she started in with this show as a chorus-girl. But Galbraith, the director, got interested in her, and put her into the sextette."

"Well, there we are," said John Williamson. "That settles it. Rose never was a dressmaker, that's a cinch."

Even Violet seemed a little shaken, and Jimmy was just beginning to congratulate himself on the skill with which he had modified what Block had told him about the costumes, when Violet began on him again.

"All right!" she said. "Where are we? You know quite a lot of people in that show, don't you?" This was a rhetorical question. It was notorious that Jimmy knew more or less everybody. So, without waiting for an answer, she went on, "Well, have you been behind the scenes there since the thing began?"

"No, I've not gone back," said Jimmy. "Why should I?"

"You haven't even been curious," she questioned, "to find out what a girl who looked and talked as much like Rose as that, was like?" She concluded, for good measure, with one more question voiced a little differently--more casually. "Have you happened to see Rodney lately?"

"Why, yes," Jimmy said unwarily. "I met him at the club the other day; only saw him for a minute or two. We had one drink."

"And did you happen to tell him," she asked, "about this dressmaker in _The Girl Up-stairs_ who looked so wonderfully like Rose? Did you offer to take him round to see for himself?"

"I tell you there's nothing to that!" said John. He'd been caught in the same trap, it seemed. "What's the use of butting in? If anything has gone wrong with those two ..."

"You've always said there hasn't," Violet interrupted.

"And you've said," he countered, "that you were sure there had. Well, then, if there's a chance of it, why run the risk, just for nothing?"

Jimmy, as it happened, had never heard even a suggestion that Rose and Rodney were on any other terms than those of perfect amity. He hoped they'd go on and tell him more. So to prevent their becoming suddenly discreet, he promptly changed the subject.