CHAPTER XV

IN FLIGHT

Analyzing what little Alec McEwen actually said, disregarding the tone

of his voice and the look in his eye; disregarding, indeed, the meaning

he attached to his own words, and sticking simply to the words

themselves, it would be difficult to bring home against him the charge

of untruthfulness, or even of exaggeration.

Because it was in a simple panic that Rose, on the morning after

Rodney's visit, had gone to Goldsmith and demanded to be transferred to

the second company, which had started rehearsing as soon as a month of

capacity business had demonstrated that the piece was a success.

Goldsmith was disgusted. Little Alec had been right about that, too. The

unnaturalness of the request--for indeed it flew straight in the face of

all traditions that a girl who might stay in Chicago if she liked,

taking it easy and having a lot of fun, and rejoicing in the possession

of a job that was going to last for months, should deliberately swap

this highly desirable position for the hazards and discomforts of a

second-rate road company, playing one-night stands over the kerosene

circuit--was one too many for him. He demanded explanations without

getting any. And as Jimmy Wallace had guessed, it was not until she'd

convinced him that in no circumstances would she stay on in the Chicago

company that he assented to the transfer. He didn't abandon his attempts

to dissuade her until the very last moment. But neither his pictures of

the discomforts of the road, nor his carefully veiled promises of

further advancement if she stayed in Chicago, had the slightest effect

on her. All that she wanted was to get away, and as quickly as she

could!

The collapse of her courage was not quite the sudden thing it seemed.

Forces she was vaguely aware had been at work, but didn't realize the

seriousness of, had been undermining it steadily since the opening night

when she recognized Jimmy Wallace in the audience, and when later she

parted from Galbraith with his promise of a New York job as soon as he

could get his own affairs ready for her.

Chief of these forces was the simple reaction of fatigue. Strong as she

was, she had abused her strength somewhat during the last weeks of

rehearsal; had taken on and triumphantly accomplished more than any one

has a right to accomplish without calculating on replacing his depleted

capital of energy afterward. It was her first experience with this sort

of exhaustion, and she hadn't learned (indeed it is a lesson she never

did fully learn) to accept the phase with philosophic calm as the

inevitable alternate to the high-tension effective one.

She missed Galbraith horribly. She had, as she'd told him, personified

the show as a mere projection of himself; he was it and it was he.

Everything she said and did on the stage had continued, as it had begun

in her very first rehearsal by being, just the expression of his will

through her instrumentality. It was amazing to her that, with the core

of it drawn out, the fabric should still stand; that the piece should go

on repeating itself night after night, automatically, awakening the

delighted applause of that queer foolish monster, the audience, just

with its galvanic simulation of the life he had once imparted to it.

She was doing her own part, she felt at all events, in a manner utterly

lifeless and mechanical. It was a stifling existence!

The most discouraging thing about it was that the others in the company

seemed not to feel it in the same way. Anabel Astor for example: night

after night she seemed to be born anew into her part with the rise of

the first curtain; she fought and conquered and cajoled, and luxuriated

in the approbation of every new audience, just as she had in the case of

the first, and came off all aglow with her triumph, as if the thing had

never happened to her before. And with the others, in varying degrees,

even with the chorus people, the effect seemed to be the same.

But it was actually in the air, Rose believed, not merely in her own

fancy, that she was failing to justify the promise she had given at

rehearsal. Not alarmingly, to be sure. She was still plenty good enough

to hold down her job. But the notion, prevalent, it appeared, before the

opening, that she was one of those persons who can't be kept down in the

chorus, but project themselves irresistibly into the ranks of the

principals, was coming to be considered a mistake.

Galbraith, as was evident from his last talk with her, hadn't made that

mistake. She remembered his having said she never could be an actress.

That was all right of course. She didn't want to be. In a way, it was

just because she didn't want to be that she couldn't be. But having it

come home to her as it was doing now, in her own experience, made her

all the more impatient to get out of the profession that wasn't hers and

into the one that had beckoned her so alluringly.

It was just here that her disappointment was sharpest. The light that

for a few weeks had flared up so brightly, showing a clear path of

success that would lead her back to Rodney, had, suddenly, just when she

needed it most, gone out and left her wondering whether, after all, it

had been a true beacon or only fool's fire.

A resolution she came to within twenty-four hours after Galbraith left

was that she would not wait passively for his letter summoning her to

New York. She'd go straight to work (and fill in the disconcerting

emptiness of her days at the same time) preparing herself for the

profession of stage costume designing. She wasn't entirely clear in her

mind as to just what steps this preparation should consist in, but the

fact that Galbraith had once asked to see her sketches and had seemed

amazed to learn that she hadn't any, gave her the hint that she might do

well to learn to draw. She knew, of course, that she couldn't learn very

much in the fortnight or so she supposed would elapse before Galbraith's

letter came in, but she could learn a little. And anything to do that

went in the right direction was better than blankly doing nothing.

Her first adventure in this direction was downright ludicrous, as she

was aware without being able to summon the mood to appreciate it. The

girls she'd known, back in the Edgewater days, who had ambitions to

learn to draw went to the Art Institute. So Rose, summoning her courage

for a sortie across the avenue, want there too, and felt, as she climbed

the steps between the lions, a little the way Christian did in similar

circumstances. After waiting a while she was shown into the office of an

affable young man, with efficient looking eye-glasses and a keen sort of

voice, and told him with admirable brevity that she wanted to learn to

draw, as a preliminary to designing costumes.

He approved this ambition cordially enough and made it evident that the

resources of the institute were entirely adequate to her needs. But

then, just about simultaneously, she made the discovery that the course

he was talking about was one of from three to five years' duration, and

he, that the time immediately at her disposal amounted to something like

a fortnight. They were mutually too completely disconcerted to do

anything, for a moment, but stare at each other. When he found his

breath he told her that he was afraid they couldn't do anything for her.

"There are places, of course, here in town (there's one right down the

street) where they'll take you on for a month, or a week, or a day, if

you like; let you begin working in oil in the life class the vary first

morning, if you've a notion to. But we don't believe in that

get-rich-quick sort of business. We believe in laying the foundation

first."

His manner in describing the other sort of place had been so

annihilating, his purpose in citing this horrible example was so plain,

that he was justifiably taken aback when she asked him, very politely,

to be sure, "Would you mind telling me where that other place is; the

one down the street?"

He did mind exceedingly, and it is likely he wouldn't have done it if

she'd been less extraordinarily good to look at and if there hadn't

been, in her very expressive blue eyes, a gleam that suggested she was

capable of laughing at him for having trapped himself like that. She

wasn't laughing at him now, be it understood; had made her request with

a quite adorable seriousness. Only ...

He gave her the address of an art academy on Madison Street and thither

at once she made her way, faintly cheered by the note on which her

encounter with the young man had ended, but on the whole rather

depressed by the thought of the five years he'd talked about.

They were more tactful at the new place. _Ars Longa est_ was not a motto

they paraded. They were not shocked at all at the notion of a young

woman's learning as much as she could about drawing in two weeks. There

was a portrait sketch class every morning; twenty minute poses. You put

down as much as you could of how the model looked to you in that space

of time, and then began again on something else. All the equipment Rose

would need was a big apron, a stick of charcoal and a block of drawing

paper; all of which were obtainable on the premises. She could begin

this minute if she liked. It was almost as simple as getting on a

pay-as-you-enter street-car.

This jumped with Rose's mood exactly, and she promptly fell to, with a

momentary flare-up of the zest with which she had gone to work for

Galbraith. But it was only momentary. She hadn't a natural aptitude for

drawing, and her attempts to make the black lines she desperately dug

and smudged into the white paper represent, recognizably, the object she

was looking at failed so lamentably as to discourage her almost from the

start.

She kept at it for the two weeks she'd contracted for, but at the end of

that time she gave it up. She hadn't made any visible progress, and

besides, she might be hearing from Galbraith almost any day now.

And when, four or five days later, her intolerable restlessness over

waiting for a letter that didn't come, making up reasons why it hadn't

come, one minute, and deciding that it never would, the next, drove her

to do something once more, she set out on a new tack. If the ability to

make fancy little water-colors of impossible-looking girls in only less

impossible costumes were really an essential part of the business of

designing the latter, then she'd have to set about learning, in a

systematic way, to paint them; find out the proper way to begin, and

take her time about it. Her two weeks at the academy had proved that it

wasn't a knack that she could pick up casually. But there were books on

costumes, she knew; histories of clothes, that went as far back as any

sort of histories, with marvelous colored plates which gave you all the

details. Bertie Willis had told her all about that when they were

getting up their group for the Charity Ball. There were shelves of them,

she knew, over at the Newberry Library. A knowledge of their contents

would be sure to be valuable to her when Galbraith should set her to

designing more costumes for him--if ever he did.

This misgiving, that she might never hear from him, that his plans had

changed since their talk, so that he wasn't going to need any assistant,

or that he had found some one in New York better qualified for the work,

was, really, a little artificial. She encouraged it as a defense against

another which was, in its insidious way, much more terrifying.

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 antennæ

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 régime 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 crêpe 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 matinée.

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 matinée 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 matinée.