Would she ever be capable, again, of producing another idea in case it should be wanted? That one little flash of inspiration she'd had, that had resulted in the twelve costumes for the sextette--where had it come from? How had she happened on it? Wasn't it, perhaps, just a fluke that never could be repeated? During those wonderful days she had had antennae out everywhere, bringing her impressions, suggestions from the unlikeliest objects. Now they were all drawn in and the part of her mind that had responded to them felt numb.

She ignored this sensation, or rather this absence of sensation, as well as she could; just as one might ignore the creeping approach of paralysis. She had an unacknowledged reason for going to the library and beginning that historic study of costumes. Certainly the sight of those quaint old plates ought to set her imagination racing again.

But it didn't work that way. She found herself poring over them, yawning herself blind over the French legends that accompanied them.

(They were nearly all in French, these books, and though Rose had done two years' work in this language at the university and passed all her examinations, she found these technical descriptions of costumes frightfully hard to understand.) She stuck at it, though, for a long while, until one morning a comparison occurred to her that made her shut the folio with a slam. It had been in just this way, with just this dogged, blind, hopeless persistence, that, ages ago, in that former incarnation, she'd tried to study law!

This was too much for her. She walked out of the library with the best appearance of unconcern that she could muster,--it had been a near thing that she didn't break down and cry--and she did not go back. Probably it was just as well that Galbraith hadn't sent for her. She'd only have made a ghastly failure of it, if he had.

The background, of course, to all these endeavors and discouragements, or, to describe it more justly, the indivisible, all-permeating ether they floated about in, was, just as it had been in the time of her success--Rodney. The occupations, routine and otherwise, that she gave her mind to, might seem, in a way, to crowd him out of it, although not one of them was undertaken without some reference to him; the success of this, the failure of that, brought him nearer, put him farther away, like the children's game of _Warm and Cold_.

When she ran out of occupations that could absorb the conscious part of her mind, she did not even try to resist direct thoughts about him.

She'd spent uncounted hours since that opening night, wondering if he knew where she was, inventing reasons why, knowing, he didn't come to her; explanations of the possibility of his still remaining in ignorance. She'd gone over and over again, the probable things that he would say, the things that she would say in reply, when he did come.

She was prepared for his anger. He was, she felt, entitled to be angry.

But she felt sure she could get him to listen while she told him just why and how she had done it, and what she had done, and she had a sort of tremulous confidence that when the story was told, entire, his anger would be found to have abated, if not altogether to have disappeared.

And afterward, when the shock had worn off, and he had had time to adjust himself to things, he'd begin to feel a little proud of her. They could commence--being friends. She'd constructed and let her mind dwell on almost every conceivable combination of circumstances, except the one thing that happened.

Only, as the active actual half of her life grew more discouraging, harder to steer toward any object that seemed worth attaining, her imaginary life with Rodney lost its grip on fact and reason; became roseate, romantic, a thinner and more iridescent bubble, readier to burst and disappear altogether at an ungentle touch.

So you will understand, I think, that the Rose, who incredulously heard him ask in that dull sullen tone, if she had anything besides what would go into her trunk; the Rose who got up and turned on the light for a look at him in the hope that the evidence of her eyes would belie that of her ears; the Rose he left shuddering at the window in that quilted dressing-gown, was not the Rose who had left him three months before and rented that three-dollar room and wrung a job out of Galbraith!

Dimly she was aware of this herself. At her best she wouldn't have lost her head, wouldn't have flown to pieces like that. If she'd kept any sort of grip on the situation, she might at least have averted a total shipwreck. She understood even on that gray morning, that the terrible things he'd said to her had been a mere outcry; the expression of a mood she had encountered before, though this was an extreme example of it.

But it was a long time before she went any further than that. The memory of the whole episode from the moment when he came up to her there in the alley and took her by the shoulders, until he closed her door upon himself four hours or so later, was so exquisitely painful that any reasoned analysis of it, any construction of potential alternatives to the thing that had happened, was simply impossible. The misgiving that with a little more courage and patience on her part, it might have terminated differently, only added to her misery.

She felt like a coward when she went to Goldsmith and demanded to be sent out on the road, and she experienced for a while, the utter demoralization of cowardice. The logic of the situation told her to stay where she was. If it were true, as she had fiercely told him that night, that their life together was ended, the whole fabric that they had woven for themselves rent clean across, then the only thing for her to do was to begin living now, as she had made an effort to do before, quite without reference to him, ordering her own existence as if he had ceased to exist; stick to whatever offered herself, Doris Dane, the best chance for success and advancement. She was, of course, seriously injuring Doris Dane's chances by going out on the road.

And, even with reference to Rodney, it was hard to see how her flight could help the situation. If what she'd done had really disgraced him in his own eyes and in those of his world, the disgrace was already complete. Acquiescing in that point of view, as by her flight she did, couldn't lighten it.

But all the power these considerations had, was to make her flight seem more ignominious. They were utterly incapable of preventing it.

A disinterested friend, had she boasted such a possession just then, might have pointed out for her comfort, that her rout was not complete.

It was a retreat, but not a surrender. She hadn't become Rose Stanton again and gone back to Portia and her mother. Doris Dane, though badly battered, was still intact!

The first ten days of her life on the road had, on the whole, a distinctly restorative effect. I have never heard of a physician's recommending a course of one-night stands as a rest cure to nervously exhausted patients, but I am inclined to think the idea has its merits, for all that. Certainly the regime was, for a while, beneficial to Rose.

The merit of it was that it offered some sort of occupation for practically all her time.

A typical day consisted in getting up in the morning at an hour determined for you either by the call posted on the bulletin board in the theater the night before, telling you what time you were to be at the railway station, or by the last moment at which you could get into the dining-room in the hotel. You ate all you could manage at breakfast, because lunch was likely to consist of a sandwich and an orange bought from the train butcher; with perhaps the lucky addition of a cup of coffee at some junction point where you changed trains. You lugged your suit-case down to the station, and had your arrival there noted by the manager, who, of course, bought all the tickets for the company. You needn't even bother to know where you were going, except out of idle curiosity. The train came along and you got a seat by yourself on the shady side, if you could; though the men being more agile, generally got there first.

The convention of giving precedence to the ladies, Rose promptly discovered, and with a sort of satisfaction, did not apply. Indeed, all the automatic small courtesies and services which, in any life she'd known, men had been expected to show to women, were here completely barred. A girl could let a man come up to her on a platform where they were all gathered waiting for the train, and casually slide an arm around her, without any one's paying the slightest attention to the act.

But if, when the train came along, she permitted him to pick up her suit-case, carry it into the train and find a seat for her, there would be nods and glances.

Well, you got into the train and dozed and read a magazine (or both) and by and by, when everybody else did, you got up and got out. Perhaps you waited on a triangular railway platform for another train, or perhaps you trailed along in a procession, to a hotel. In the latter case, you got a meal and found out where the opera-house was.

There were various minor occupations that you slipped into the interstices of a day like this whenever they happened to come. You combed out and brushed your hair (a hundred strokes) which you were too tired to do at night after the performance and seldom waked up in time for in the morning. And, if you were wise, as Rose was, thanks to a tip from Anabel, and had emancipated yourself from the horror of overnight laundries by providing yourself with crepe underclothes and dark little silk blouses, you got all the hot water you could beg of the chambermaid, and did the family wash in the bowl in your room, on an afternoon when you had a short jump and there was no matinee.

It was a life, of course, that abounded in what pass for hardships.

There is no desolation to surpass that of the second-best hotel (rates two dollars a day), in a small middle western city, except the same kind of hotel in the same sort of city in the South. Bad air, bad beds and bad food are their staples and what passes for service seems especially calculated to encourage the victim to dispense with it as far as possible. The stages and dressing-rooms in the theaters were almost always dirty and were frequently overrun with rats. It was always cold and drafty back there, except when it happened to be suffocating. Also, the day's work by no means invariably concluded with even a half a bed in a two-dollar-a-day hotel. If there happened to be a train coming along at two o'clock in the morning, and also happened to be a chance to play a matinee in the town you were jumping to, you took your suit-case to the theater, lugged it from there after the performance, to the station, and spent an indefinite number of hours thereafter, in an air-tight waiting-room. Waiting, be it observed, for a chance to curl up in a seat in the day-coach, when the train came along.

But Rose didn't mind this very much. The rooms assigned to her and her roommate were fully as comfortable as the one she had lived in on Clark Street, and the meals, as a whole, were rather better than those her habitual lunch-room had provided. As for riding on the train: it gave you the sense of doing something and getting somewhere, without imposing the necessity either for judgment or for resolution. The real discomforts to Rose were not the material ones.

The piece had been, as she discovered during the one rehearsal she had attended in Chicago, deliberately cheapened and vulgarized for the road.

The only one of the principals who had a shred of professional reputation, was a comedian named Max Webber, who played the part of the cosmetic king. He'd come up in vaudeville and his methods reeked of it.

He was featured in the billing and he arrogated all the privileges of a real star. He was intensely and destructively jealous of any approbation he didn't himself arouse, even if it was manifested when he was not on the stage. He distended his part out of all reasonable semblance, and to the practical annihilation of the plot, by the injection into it of musty vaudeville specialties of his, which he assured the weak-kneed management were knock-outs. And his clowning and mugging made it impossible to play a legitimate scene with him, with any shadow of professional self-respect.

The result of this was that the girl who had rehearsed Patricia Devereux's part, an ambitious, well-equipped young woman who would have added much-needed strength to the cast, delivered an ultimatum during the last rehearsal but one, and on having her very reasonable demands rejected, walked out. Olga Larson, who had understudied Patricia ever since the Chicago opening, was given the part. The rest of the principals were either pathetic failures with lamentable stories of better days, or promising youngsters, like Olga herself, with no adequate training.

The chorus was similarly constituted. There were fifteen girls in it, including the sextette, now a trio, part of them worn-out veterans (one of these was the duchess--do you remember her?--who had applied to Galbraith for a job the day that Rose got hers) and the others green young girls, not more than sixteen or seventeen, some of them, who had never been on the stage before. It was one of these, a tiny, slim, black-haired little thing, who gave her name as Dolly Darling, but hadn't memorized it yet herself, obviously a runaway in quest of romantic adventure, whom Rose adopted as a permanent roommate.

Her doing so opened up the breach between herself and Olga Larson. It had existed, beneath the surface, ever since the night she had gone to supper with Galbraith. It wasn't that Olga believed Rose had taken Galbraith as a lover. She hadn't believed that even when she hurled the accusation against her. The wounding thing was that Rose seemed not to care whether she believed it or not; had met her tempestuous pleas for forgiveness and her offers of unlimited love and faith "whatever Rose might do and however things might look," with a cold distaste that hardly differed from the feeling she had shown in response to the tempest of angry accusation. She told Olga, to be sure, that everything was all right; that the thing for both of them to do, was to treat the quarrel as if it hadn't occurred.

This wasn't what Olga wanted at all. She wanted Rose as an emotional objective, to love passionately and be jealous of, and, for a moment now and then, hate, as a preliminary to another passionate reconciliation.

Rose had divined that this was so. Indeed, she understood it far better than Olga did, having had to evade one or two "crushes" of a similar sort while she was at the university. It was a sort of thing that went utterly against her instincts, and she was secretly glad that the quarrel on the opening night had given her a method of resisting this one that need not seem too utterly heartless.

Since the quarrel, Olga had been distant and dignified. She had a grievance (that Rose, pretending to forgive her confessed mistake, had really not done so) but she was bearing it bravely. Rose, when she could manage the manner, was good-humored and casual, and completely blind to the existence of the grievance Olga so nobly concealed. But Olga's wonderful good fortune, coming quite unheralded as it did, an advancement she had played with in her day-dreams, and never thought of as a realizable possibility, swept her out of her pose and carried her with a rush into Rose's arms.

This happened not a quarter of an hour after Rose had secured Goldsmith's consent to her own transfer to the Number Two company, and the first thing that registered on her mind was that she, who had taught Olga to talk, saved her her job, prevailed on Galbraith to dress her properly, and won her a chance for the space of that one song refrain, to make her individual appeal to the audience--Rose, who had done all this, was now going out as a chorus-girl in the company of which Olga was the leading woman. She didn't regret Olga's promotion, but she did wish, for herself, that she might have been spared just now, this ironic little cackle of laughter on the part of the malicious Goddess of Chance.

She was ashamed of the feeling--was she getting as small as that?--and, in consequence, she congratulated Olga a good deal more warmly than otherwise she would have done. But this warmer manner of hers opened Olga's flood-gates so wide, swamped her in such a torrent of sentiment, that Rose simply took to flight.

There was an element of real maternal pity in Rose's adoption of little Dolly Darling as her chum. Dolly was obviously as fragile and ephemeral as a transparent sand-fly. She had nothing that you could call a mind or a character, even of the most rudimentary sort. She knew nothing, except how to dance, and she knew that exactly as a kitten knows how to play with a ball of string; she dreamed of diamonds and wonderful restaurants and a sardonic hero nine feet tall with a straight nose and a long chin, who would clutch her passionately in his arms (there was no more real passion in her than there is in a soap-bubble) and murmur vows of eternal adoration in her ears.

She was a soap-bubble; that's the figure for her; just an iridescent reflection, wondrously distorted, of the tawdry life about her--a reflection, and then nothing!

But just the thin empty frailness of her, her gaiety in the face of perfectly inevitable destruction, appealed to Rose. She had Dolly in her pocket in five minutes, and before the end of the rehearsal, their treaty was signed and sealed. They were to be chums, bosom friends! The notion of it gave Rose the most spontaneous smile she'd had in days; the first one that hadn't had a bitter quirk in it.

When, down at the union station on Sunday morning, as they were leaving, Olga unfolded her plan that she and Rose should room together, Rose owned up to herself that there had been another element than maternal pity in her adoption of Dolly. She'd suspected that Olga would propose something of this sort, and she had fortified herself against it.

Olga was furious, of course, when she learned what Rose had done, and accused her, with a measure of justice, of having done it to be rid of her. If Rose didn't want to remain under this imputation, she could break with Dolly. When Rose refused to do this, Olga cut her off utterly; damned her, disowned her. They were the first pair in the company to begin not to speak.

As I said, the chief discomforts for Rose in those first ten days on the road, were not the material ones. Olga's absurd way of ignoring her, the fact that she attributed their quarrel, for the benefit of the company, to Rose's jealousy of her success; worst of all, the fact that Rose couldn't be sure she wasn't jealous of Olga's success, didn't feel at least, contemplating their reversed positions, more like a failure than she would have felt had the original girl kept the leading part,--all this contributed to a discomfort that did matter, that tormented, abraded, rankled.

It became the core of a sensation that she had turned cheap and shabby; that the distinction, which with her first entrance into this life, she had built up between herself and most of her colleagues, was breaking down; that her fiber was coarsening, her fine sensitiveness becoming calloused. It troubled her that she should feel so languid an indifference over the vulgarity of the piece, a vulgarity which, under Webber's infection, grew more blatant every day.

It was obvious to her that this quality was destroying whatever slim chance for success they had. The lines, with the new ugly twist that had been imparted to them, might draw a half dozen rude guffaws from different parts of the audience, but the chill disfavor with which they were received by the rest of the house, must, she felt, have been apparent to everybody. There seemed, though, to be a superstition that a laugh was a sacred thing; something to be fed carefully with more of the same thing that had originally produced it. This treatment was persisted in, despite the fact that the audiences shrank and shriveled and the box-office receipts, she gathered from the gossip of the company, hung just about at the minimum required to keep them going.

What troubled her was her own apathetic acceptance of it all. Just as her ear seemed to have grown dull to the offenses that nightly were committed against it on the stage, and to the leering response, which was all they ever got from across the footlights, so her spirit submitted tamely to the prospect of failure. She hardly seemed to herself the same person who had set to work in a blaze of eager enthusiasm, on the part she played so mechanically now.

She tried to reassure herself with the reflection that the tour meant nothing to her, except as it fell in with an ulterior purpose, and that it was actually serving that purpose well enough. She'd deliberately turned aside from the main channel of her new life to give mind and soul a rest they needed. When she'd got that rest and rallied her courage, she'd take a fresh start. She had, lying safely in the bank in Chicago, where Galbraith had taken her, something over two hundred dollars; for she'd lived thriftily during the Chicago engagement and had added a little every week to her nest-egg of profit from the costuming business.

So she had enough to get her to New York and see her through the process of finding a new job. What sort of job it would be, she was still too tired to think, but she was sure she could find something.

Meantime, out there on the road, she was making no effort to save. She indulged in whatever small ameliorations to their daily discomforts her weekly wage would run to.

It was thus that matters stood with her, when, with the rest of the company, she arrived in Dubuque on a Wednesday morning, with an hour or so to spare before the matinee.