Chapter 37

SUCCESS--AND A RECOGNITION

There is a kaleidoscopic character about the events of the ten days or so preceding the opening performance of most musical comedies which would make a sober chronicle of them seem fantastically incredible; and this law of Nature made no exception in the case of _The Girl Up-stairs_. There were rehearsals which ran so smoothly and swiftly that they'd have done for performances; there were others so abominably bad that the bare idea of presenting the mess resulting from six weeks' toil, before people who had paid money to see it, was a nightmare.

As the nervous pressure mounted, people took to exploding all over the place in the most grotesquely inconceivable ways and from totally unpredictable causes. Freddy France, who played the comic detective (like most comedians he had no sense of humor whatever and treated his "art" with a sort of sacrificial solemnity), developed delusions of persecution, proclaimed himself the victim of a conspiracy to which the owners, the author, Galbraith and most of the principals were parties, and finally, when the director cut out a little scene that he had two feeble jokes in, reached up unexpectedly and hit McGill on the nose, flung his part on the stage, stamped on it and left the theater. Quan read his lines in a painstaking manner for two days and then, after a three-hour session in the Sherman House bar, Freddy was induced to come back.

Stewart Lester, one day, at the end of a long patient effort of Galbraith's to improve his acting (he acted like a tenor; one needn't say more than that), licked his thin red lips, and in a feline fury, announced his indifference as to whether the management accepted his resignation or that of Miss Devereux. As long as she insisted on treating her vis-à-vis like a chorus-man, she'd perhaps be happier if a chorus-man were given the part; and he would he only too happy, in case the management agreed with her, to make the substitution possible. Whereupon Miss Devereux remarked that even having been a failure in grand opera didn't necessarily assure a man success in musical comedy, and that possibly a chorus-man would be an improvement. Galbraith had a long private conference with each of them--the fact that they would not speak at all off stage guaranteed him against their comparing notes as to what he'd said--and while the thing he effected could not be called a reconciliation, it amounted to a sort of armed truce. They went through their love scenes without actually scratching and biting.

Even little Anabel Astor, whose good humor for a long time had seemed invincible, tempestuously left the stage one day in the middle of one of her scenes with her dancing partner, and could be heard sobbing loudly in the wings through all that remained of that rehearsal.

Queer things began happening to the plot, resulting sometimes from the violent transposition of song numbers from one act to another, sometimes from the interpolation of songs or specialties. Two or three scenes, which the author regarded with special pride and was prepared to die in the defense of, were pronounced by Galbraith to be junk. He had made superhuman efforts, he told Goldsmith and Block, to put a little life into them, and had demonstrated that this miracle was impossible of performance. They were dead and they'd got to be buried before they became, to the olfactory sense, any more unpleasant.

There was an ominous breathlessness in the air after this ultimatum had been delivered, and at the next rehearsal, when the director announced the cut of six solid pages of manuscript, the voice of the author was heard from back of the hall proclaiming in a hollow Euripidean bellow that it was all over. He was going to his lawyer to get an injunction against the production of the piece.

Of all the persons directly, or even remotely, affected by this nerve-shattering confusion, Rose was perhaps the least perturbed. The only thing that really mattered to her, was the successful execution of those twelve costumes. The phantasmagoria at North End Hall was a regrettable, but necessary, interruption of her more important activities. The interruption didn't interfere so seriously as at first she thought it would. The routine of rehearsal as Galbraith developed it, began with special scenes--isolated bits that needed modification or polishing. The general rehearsals, taking this act or that and going through with it from beginning to end, and involving, of course, the presence of everybody in the company, didn't, as a rule, begin till three in the afternoon; sometimes till as late as five. Of course when they did begin, they lasted until all hours.

But the labors of the chorus, and even of the sextette, shrank very much in proportion to the work of the principals. Nearly all the changes that were made were in the direction of compressing the chorus and giving the principals more room. So that for long stretches of time, during which, dressed in her working clothes and curled up in one of the remoter of the cushioned window-seats, but ready to answer a summons to the stage as promptly as a fireman, she could let her mind run without interruption on the solution of some of her own problems, and then be ready when she went back to her room, to fall into bed and asleep (the two acts had become practically simultaneous) secure in the possession of a clearly thought out program for the morrow.

She wakened automatically at half past seven and was down-town by half past eight, to do whatever shopping the work of the previous day revealed the need of. The fact that it was, for the greater part, John Galbraith's money she was spending (she had managed to put in a little herself by calculating down to a fine point the necessary margin for existence) worked to her advantage in these operations. She could not, but for that fact, have forced herself to hunt down bargains so persistently nor to keep the incidental expense for findings and such, so low.

At nine-thirty in the morning--an unheard of hour in the theater--the watchman at the Globe let her in the stage door, and Rose had half an hour before the arrival of the wardrobe mistress and her assistant, for looking over the work done since she had left for rehearsal the day before.

She liked this quiet, cavernous old barn of a place down under the Globe stage; liked it when she had it to herself before the two sewing women came and later, when, with a couple of sheets spread down on the floor she cut and basted according to her cambric patterns, keeping ahead of the flying needles of the other two. After her own little room, the mere spaciousness of it seemed almost noble. She even liked it, when, about half past one in the afternoon, on matinée days, the chorus-girls of the show now drawing to the end of its run, began dawdling in, passing shrill jokes with Bill Flynn, the fireman, rummaging through the mail in the letter-box, casually unfastening their clothes all the while, preliminary to kimonos and make-up, gathering in little knots about the sewing-machines and exclaiming in profane delight over the costumes. She wondered at herself, sometimes, for having ceased to mind their language, their shameless way of going half-clad, their general atmosphere of moth-like worthlessness--and then laughed at herself for wondering!

How would her own quality be finer, her soul a more ample thing, for the keeping, on one of the shelves of it, of a pot of carefully preserved horror? If she could succeed with these costumes, her success, she hoped, would lead her directly into the business of designing other costumes for the stage. And if she became a professional stage costumer, this rather loose, ramshackle, down-at-the-heel morality of back-stage musical comedy would be a permanent fact in her life, just as the dustiness of law-books and the stuffiness of court rooms were permanent facts in Rodney's.

As the work went on, her confidence in the success of this initiatory venture became less ecstatic and more reasonable. A few of the costumes were finished and, seen on live models (a couple of girls in the chorus in the Globe show had volunteered to try on) were, if Rose knew anything at all about clothes, without doubt or qualification, good.

She had had just one really bad quarter of an hour over them, and that, back on Christmas Day as it happened, was when Galbraith, having detained her after he had dismissed the rehearsal, asked to see her sketches.

"Sketches!" she echoed, perplexed.

"Oh, I don't mean regular water-colored plates," he said. "Just whatever rough drafts of the things you will have put down on paper to start yourself off with. It's simple curiosity, you understand."

"But," she gasped, "I haven't put anything down on paper--not anything at all! I don't know how to draw."

And now he was perplexed in turn. How could one design a costume without drawing a picture of it?

She explained her working method to him; though not, she felt, very successfully. She was perhaps a bit flustered, and he didn't seem to be giving her his complete attention--seemed to be covering up, with the pretense of listening, a strong interior abstraction.

This was again a good diagnosis as far as it went. Only it didn't dig in far enough for even the faintest surmise as to what the nature of his abstraction was.

"I could bring the patterns down here. Or, if you had time, you could come up to my room and see them. But I'm afraid you couldn't tell much from that, because they're all taken apart, you see, and they're just in paper cambric and not the right colors."

What the man was struggling for--it had been his sole reason for detaining her in the first place--was some sort of opening that would make it seem natural to tell her he hoped her Christmas Day had not been too intolerably unhappy; to shake hands with her and wish her luck--assure her in one way or another, that she had in him a friend she could bring her troubles to--any sort of troubles. He'd made up his mind to do this when the Christmas rehearsal should he over, as long ago as the night of their walk down the avenue. This resolution had been reinforced by the look he had caught in her face when she came up to rehearsal this afternoon--a rather misty, luminous, exalted look,--a little lack of definition about her eyelids suggesting there had been tears there.

This was good observation like her own of him. But, again like hers, in its failure to get the central clue, it only mislead him, the worse. If he could have guessed that she had been having a Christmas celebration of her own that day; that there had been unwrapped and displayed, three little presents she had bought the day before; one for her husband, and one for each of her two babies, and that, just before starting for rehearsal, she had wrapped them up and put them into her trunk to await the day when they could be given, it might have altered matters somewhat.

The thing that finally made it clearly impossible for Galbraith to express anything at all of this feeling which he, in good faith, called friendship for her, was her alternative offer--if he had time, to take him up to her room for a look at the patterns.

If she's seen him as anything at all but starkly her employer and her financier; if she's had the faintest glimmer of him as one who held for her any personal feelings whatever, she never would have suggested as an alternative to her bringing the patterns here to rehearsal, his coming up to her room for a look at them.

The thing of all others that irritated Galbraith was the possession of a divided mind. Just now, disappointed as he was, almost to the point of pain, though he wouldn't acknowledge to himself that it went as far as that, over the evident fact that his relation to the girl, in spite of their partnership, was exactly what it had been from the beginning, he was still aware that if he'd got the opening he wanted, had managed another of those warm lithe hand-clasps with her, and had got the notion across to her that he wanted her to make a friend of him and a confidant, he'd be going away now, afterward, under the painful misgiving that he was a bit of an old fool. The product of all this irritation was, however, that he declined Rose's offer of a view of her patterns rather bruskly.

"It was just curiosity, as I said. Go along your own way and don't worry about me. You will be all right."

Rose couldn't feel much conviction behind this expression of confidence, and she went away, as I have said, in a sort of panic. Was she all wrong, after all? Couldn't you design stage costumes except by making pictures of them? She knew what he meant by water-colored plates. She'd seen them framed in the lobbies at musical shows she'd been to with Rodney. That was how costume designers worked, was it? Well she knew she never could do anything like that.

But her fears only lasted until she got back to her room and caught a reassuring look at the pattern that was assembled on the form. After all, the pictures in the lobby weren't so important as the costumes on the stage. And as for Galbraith--well, if he didn't expect too much of her, that was all the better.

In keeping with the good luck which had attended everything that happened in connection with this first venture of hers, she was able to tell Galbraith that both sets of costumes were done and ready to try on, on the very day he announced that the next rehearsal would be held at ten to-morrow morning at the Globe. It might very easily have happened, of course, that Rose's enterprise, together with Galbraith's partnership in it, had become known here or there, got passed on from one to another, with modifications and embellishments according to fancy, and grown to be a monument of scandal and conjecture. But nothing is more capricious than the heat-lightning of gossip, and it just chanced that, up to the morning of Rose's little triumph, no one beyond Galbraith and Rose herself even suspected the identity with Dane of the chorus, of the costumer who was to submit, on approval, gowns for the sextette. The fact, of course, was bound to come out on the day the company moved over for rehearsals to the Globe, and the event was very happily dramatized for Rose, by her ability to let the costumes appear first and her authorship of them only after their success was beyond dispute.

She persuaded the girls to wait until all six were dressed in the afternoon frocks and until she herself had had a chance to give each of them a final inspection and to make a few last touches and readjustments. Then they all trooped out on the stage and stood in a row, turned about, walked here and there, in obedience to Galbraith's instructions shouted from the back of the theater.

It was dark out there and disconcertingly silent. The glow of two cigars indicated the presence of Goldsmith and Block in the middle of a little knot of other spectators.

The only response Rose got--the only index to the effect her labors had produced--was the tone of Galbraith's voice. It rang on her ear a little sharper, louder, and with more of a staccato bruskness than the directions he was giving called for. And it was not his practise to put more cutting edge into his blade, or more power behind his stroke, than was necessary to accomplish what he wanted. He was excited, therefore. But was it by the completeness of her success or the calamitousness of her failure?

"All right," he shouted. "Go and put on the others."

There was another silence after they had fled out on the stage again, clad tins time in the evening gowns--a hollow heart-constricting silence, almost literally sickening. But it lasted only a moment. Then, "Will you come down here, Miss Dane?" called Galbraith.

There was a slight, momentary, but perfectly palpable shock accompanying these words--a shock felt by everybody within the sound of his voice. Because the director had not said, "Dane, come down here." He had said, "Will you come here, Miss Dane?" And the thing amounted, so rigid is the etiquette of musical comedy, to an accolade. The people on the stage and in the wings didn't know what she'd done, nor in what character she was about to appear, but they did know she was, from now on, something besides a chorus-girl.

Rose obediently crossed the runway and walked up the aisle to where Galbraith stood with Goldsmith and Block, waiting for her. She was still feeling a little numb and empty.

Galbraith, as she came up, held out a hand to her. "I congratulate you, Miss Dane," he said. "They're admirable. With all the money in the world, I wouldn't ask for anything handsomer."

Before she could say anything in reply, he directed her attention, with a nod of the head, to the partners, and walked away. Rose gasped at that. She'd never thought beyond him--beyond the necessity of pleasing him; and that he'd carry the details of the business through with Goldsmith and Block, she'd taken for granted. Now, here she was chucked into the water and told to swim. She'd never in her life, of course, tried to sell anything. What her mind first awoke to was that the partners were looking rather blank. Block, indeed, let his eyes follow the retreating Galbraith with a momentary look of outraged astonishment. Her wits, quickened by the emergency, interpreted the look. Galbraith, chucking her into the water indeed, had thrown her a life-preserver--the tip that her wares were good.

Goldsmith, quicker and shrewder than his junior, was already smiling politely. "They really are very good," he said. "If they are not too expensive for us, we'll consider buying them."

"They'll be," said Rose, "the twelve of them, four hundred and sixty-five dollars." She had something the same feeling of astonishment on hearing herself say this, that she'd had when she heard herself telling Galbraith that she'd design the costumes. Something or other had spoken without her will--almost without her knowledge. She had one figure clearly etched in her brain; that was the one hundred and ninety dollars she must pay back to Galbraith; and she'd put in fifty of her own. There was also a matter of twenty dollars or so still to be paid to the wardrobe mistress and her assistant. But this four hundred and sixty-five dollars had simply come out of the air.

Block pursed his lips and emitted a fine thin whistle of astonishment.

Goldsmith heaved a sigh. "My dear young lady," he protested. "The inducement held out to us to wait for these costumes of yours, was that they were to be cheap. But four hundred and sixty-five dollars is ridiculous! That's a lot of money."

"Quite a lot less," said Rose, "than the ones Mrs. Goldsmith picked out came to. They were just over six hundred." Goldsmith smiled indulgently. "By the figures on the tags, yes," he said. "But would we have paid that, do you think? Those figures represent what they'd like to get from people who buy one apiece. But from us, buying twelve ..." He shrugged his shoulders expressively.

Well, this was reasonable and no doubt true and it left Rose rather aghast. She turned away toward the stage with the best appearance of indifference she could muster. Her mind was making an agonized effort to add up one hundred and ninety, fifty and twenty. But in the excitement of the moment it simply balked--rejected the problem altogether. She didn't think that the total came to much over three hundred dollars, but she couldn't be sure. And then there was, sticking burr-like, somewhere, the consciousness of another hundred unaccounted for in this total. Until she could discover what the gowns had actually cost her, she couldn't say anything. Therefore, she just stood where she was and said nothing whatever.

Goldsmith cleared his throat. "Really," he said in an intensely aggrieved tone, "you must try to see it from our point of view. This production's cost us thousands of dollars. If we bankrupt ourselves before the opening night it will be a bad business for everybody. You ought to see that. The costumes are very nice, I admit that. But remember we took a chance on it. We waited for them with the idea that you'd cooperate with us in saving money."

Rose made a last frantic struggle to induce her figures to add up, but they were getting more meaningless every minute.

There was another moment of silence. Then Block took up the refrain with variations. But just as he began to speak, a brilliantly luminous ray of light struck Rose. She could have answered Goldsmith's arguments--would have done so, but for her preoccupation with that trifling sum in arithmetic. But it was incomparably better tactics not to answer at all. Because if she could answer their arguments, they in turn could answer hers. She'd be a child in their hands once she began to talk. But her silence disconcerted them--gave them nothing to go on. Well, then, she'd let them do the work and see what happened.

But suppose, through her stubborn insistence, they should refuse the costumes at any price! Well, the world wouldn't come to an end. She'd live through it somehow, and somehow she'd manage to repay Galbraith.

The partners went on talking alternately with symptoms of rising impatience.

"Oh, come," said Block at last, "we can't be all day about this! Your figure is out of all reason. If you'd said even four hundred now ..."

"Oh, yes," said Goldsmith. "We want to be liberal. We appreciate you've done a good job. Say four hundred and I'll write you a check for it now." He took a small check-book and a fountain pen out of his pocket. "That's all right, eh?"

Rose made another effort at addition. A hundred and ninety, and fifty, and twenty, and the other ghostly hundred that wouldn't account for itself and yet insisted on coming in and mixing everything up. She turned on the two partners a look of perfectly genuine distress.

"If you'll let me go away and add it up ..." she began.

Goldsmith's heart was touched. The costumes were a bargain at four hundred and sixty-five, and he knew it. There was an indescribable sort of dash to them that would lend tone to the whole production. And then the face of that pretty young girl who must have worked so desperately hard to make them and who was so obviously helpless at this bargaining game, would have moved a harder heart than his.

"Oh, all right!" he said. "We'll give in. Four hundred"--he began making out the check, but his hand hung over it a moment--"and fifty. How's that?"

Rose drew in a long breath. "That's all right," she said.

It was just as she turned away with the check made out to Doris Dane in her wrist-bag, that the mystery of that phantom hundred dollars solved itself. It was the hundred dollars she'd borrowed from Rodney and could now return to him!

Galbraith took the first chance he could make to shoot her a low-voiced question. "How much did you get?" he asked, and his face showed downright surprise when she told him. "That's a pretty fair price," he commented. "I was afraid they'd screw you way down on it, and I wanted to help you out, but ..."

"Oh, you did," said Rose. "Telling me they were good. Of course you couldn't have done anything more. The first thing I want to do," she went on, "is to pay you back. But I don't know just how to do it. I can't go to the bank where they know me and--anyway, the name on the check isn't right."

He told her how easily that could be fixed. He'd take her to the bank he used here in town and identify her. Then she could pay him and deposit the balance to her own account. It was a bank where they didn't mind small accounts. That would be much better than carrying her money around with her where it could too easily be stolen.

He was very kind about it all and they put the program through that day. Yet she was vaguely conscious of a sense that he seemed a little chilled, as if something about the transaction unaccountably depressed him.

And indeed it was true that he'd have found his tendency to fall in love with her a good deal harder to resist if she'd shown herself more helpless in the hands of Goldsmith and Block. She'd actually driven a good bargain--an unaccountably good bargain! He wished he'd been on hand to see how she did it. Well, women were queer, there was no getting away from that.

But Goldsmith and Block came back the next day and drove, in turn, a good bargain of their own.

"You've certainly got a good eye for costumes, Miss Dane," Goldsmith said, "and here's a proposition we'd like to make. A lot of these other things we've got for the regular chorus don't look so good as they might. You'll be able to see changes in them that'll improve them maybe fifty per cent. Well, you take it on, and we'll begin paying you your regular salary now; you understand, twenty-five dollars a week, beginning to-day."

Rose accepted this proposition with a warm flush of gratitude. It indicated, she felt, that they were still friendly toward her, disposed of certain misgivings she'd experienced the night before, lest in driving, unwittingly, so good a bargain with them, she had incurred their enmity.

But, from the moment her little salary began, she found herself retained, body and soul, exactly as Galbraith himself was. They'd bought all her ideas, all her energy, all her time, except a few scant hours for sleep and a few snatched minutes for meals. She gave her employers, up to the time when the piece opened at the Globe, at a conservative calculation, about five times their money's worth. Even if she hadn't been in the company she'd have found something like two days' work in every twenty-four hours, just in the wardrobe room. Because the costumes were cheap and the frank blaze of borders, footlights and spots, pitilessly betrayed the fact. One set for the ponies was so hopelessly bad that the owners refused to accept them, and Rose, on the spur of the moment, made up a costume--they were uniform, fortunately--to replace them. The wardrobe mistress, with two assistants, and under Rose's intermittent supervision, managed somehow to get them made. And there wasn't a single costume, outside Rose's own twelve, that hadn't to be remodeled more or less.

On top of all that, the really terrible grind of rehearsals began; property rehearsals, curiously disconcerting at first, where instead of indicating the business with empty hands, you actually lighted the cigarette, picked up the paper knife, pulled the locket out from under your dress and opened it--and, in the process of doing these things, forgot everything else you knew; scenery rehearsals that caused the stage to seem small and cluttered up and actually made some of the evolutions you'd been routined in, impossible. At last and ghastliest, a dress rehearsal, which began at seven o'clock one night and lasted till four the next morning.

It would all have been so ludicrously easy, Rose used to reflect in despair, if, like the other girls in the sextette, she'd had only her own part in the performance to attend to--only to get into her costumes at the right time, be waiting in the wings for the cue, and then come on and do the things they'd taught her to do. But, between Goldsmith and Block, who were now in a state of frantic activity and full of insane suggestions, and the wardrobe mistress who was always having to be told how to do something, every minute was occupied. She would try desperately to keep an ear alert for what was happening on the stage, in order to be on hand for her entrances. But, in spite of her, it sometimes happened that she'd be snatched from something by a furious roar from Galbraith.

"Miss Dane!" And then, when she appeared, bewildered, contrite. "You _must_ attend to the rehearsal. Those other matters can be attended to at some other time. If necessary, I can stop the rehearsal and wait till you're at liberty. But I can't pretend to rehearse and be kept waiting."

She never made any excuses; just took her place with a nod of acquiescence. But she often felt like doing as some of the rest of them did; felt it would be a perfectly enormous relief to shriek out incoherent words of abuse, burst into tears and sobs, and rush from the stage. Her position--her new position, she fancied, would entitle her to do that--once. And then the notion that she was saving up that luxurious possibility for some time when it would do the most good, would bring back her old smile. And Galbraith, lost in wonder at her already, would wonder anew.

They followed the traditions of the Globe in giving _The Girl Up-stairs_ its try-out in Milwaukee--four performances; from a Thursday to a Saturday night, with rehearsals pretty much all the time in between.

About all that this hegira meant to Rose was that she got two solid hours' sleep on the train going up on Thursday afternoon and another two hours on the train coming back on Sunday morning. She had domesticated herself automatically, in the little hotel across from the theater, and she had gone right on working just as she did at the Globe. Oddly enough, she didn't differentiate much between rehearsals and the performances. Perhaps because she was so absorbed with her labors off the stage; perhaps because the thoroughly tentative nature of everything they did was so strongly impressed on her.

The piece was rewritten more or less after every performance. They didn't get the curtain down on the first one until five minutes after twelve--for even an experienced director like Galbraith can make a mistake in timing--and the mathematically demonstrated necessity for cutting, or speeding, a whole hour out of the piece, tamed even the wild-eyed Mr. Mills. The principals, after having for weeks been routined in the reading of their lines and the execution of their business, were given new speeches to say and new things to do at a moment's notice--literally, sometimes, while the performance was going on. Ghastly things happened, of course. A tricky similarity of cues would betray somebody into a speech three scenes ahead; a cut would have the unforeseen effect of leaving somebody stranded, half-changed, in his dressing-room when his entrance cue came round; an actor would dry up, utterly forget his lines in the middle of a scene he could have repeated in his sleep--and the amazing way in which these disasters were retrieved, the way these people who hadn't, so far, impressed Rose very strongly with their collective intelligence, extemporized, righted the capsizing boat, kept the scene going--somehow--no matter what happened, gave her a new respect for their claims to a real profession.

This was the great thing they had, she concluded; the quality of coming up to the scratch, of giving whatever it took out of themselves to meet the need of the moment. They weren't--her use of this phrase harked back to the days of the half-back--yellow. If you'd walked through the train that took them back to Chicago Sunday morning, had seen them, glum, dispirited, utterly fagged out, unsustained by a single gleam of hope, you'd have said it was impossible that they should give any sort of performance that night--let alone a good one. But by eight o'clock that night, when the overture was called, you wouldn't have known them for the same people.

There is, to begin with, a certain magic about make-up which lends a color of plausibility to the paradoxical theory that our emotions spring from our facial expressions rather than the other way about. Certainly to an experienced actor, his paint--the mere act of putting it on and looking at himself in the glass as it is applied--effects for him a solution of continuity between his real self, if you can call it that, and his part; so that fatigues, discouragements, quarrels, ailments--I don't mean to say are forgotten; they are remembered well enough, but are given the quality of belonging to some one else. But beyond all that was the feeling, on the edge of this first performance, that they were now on their own. Harold Mills and the composer, Goldsmith and Block, John Galbraith, had done their best, or their worst, as the case might be. But their labors to-night would mean nothing to that rustling audience out in front. From now on it was up to the company!

The appearance, back on the stage, of John Galbraith in evening dress, just as the call of the first act brought them trooping from their dressing-rooms, intensified this sensation. He was going to be, to-night, simply one of the audience.

As a sample of the new spirit, Rose noted with hardly a sensation of surprise, that Patricia Devereux nodded amiably enough to Stewart Lester and observed that she believed the thing was going to go; and that Lester in reply said, yes, he believed it was.

Rose herself was completely dominated by it. Her nerves--slack, frayed, numb, an hour ago--had sprung miraculously into tune. She not only didn't feel tired. It seemed she never could feel tired again. Not even, going back to her university days, on the eve of a class basket-ball game, or a tennis match, had she felt that fine thrill of buoyant confidence and adequacy quite so strongly!

It wasn't until along in the third act that the audience became, for her, anything but a colloid mass--something that you squeezed and thumped and worked as you did clay, to get into a properly plastic condition of receptivity, so that the jokes, the songs, the dances, even the spindling little shafts of romance that you shot out into it, could be felt to dig in and take hold. It never occurred to her to think of it with a plural pronoun; it was "it" simply, an inchoate monster, which was, as the show progressed, delightfully loosening up, becoming good-humored, undiscriminating, stupidly infatuate; laughing at things no human being would consider funny, approving with a percussive roar things not in the least good; a monster, all the same, whose approbation gave you an intense, if quite unreasoning, pleasure.

But, along in the third act, as I said, as she came down to the footlights with the rest of the sextette in their _All Alone_ number, one face detached itself suddenly from the pasty gray surface of them that spread over the auditorium; became human--individual--and intensely familiar. Became the face, unmistakably, of Jimmy Wallace!

It is probable that of all the audience, only two men saw that anything had happened, so brief was the frozen instant while she stood transfixed. One of them was John Galbraith, in the back row, and he let his breath go out again in relief almost in the act of catching it. He guessed what had happened well enough--that she'd recognized one of those friends whose potential horror had made her willing to give up her promotion and her little part--the one she'd spoken of, perhaps, as the "only one that really mattered." But it was all right. She was going on as if nothing had happened.

The other man was Jimmy Wallace himself. He released, too, a little sigh of relief when he saw her off in her stride again after that momentary falter. But he hardly looked at the stage after that; stared absently at his program instead, and, presently, availed himself of the dramatic critic's license and left the theater.

But it wasn't to go to his desk and write his story (he was on an evening paper and so had no deadline staring him in the face) but to a quiet corner in his club, where he could, undistractedly, think.

From the moment of Rose's first appearance on the stage he had been tormented by a curiosity as to whether she was indeed Rose, or merely some one unbelievably like her. Because the fantastic impossibility that Rose Aldrich should be a member of the Globe chorus was reinforced by the fact that her gaze had traveled unconcernedly across his face a dozen times--his seat was in the fourth row, too--without the slightest flicker of recognition. Of course the way she stood there frozen for a second, when at last she did see him, settled that question. She was Rose Aldrich and she was in the Globe chorus!

But this certainty merely left him with a more insoluble perplexity on his hands; two, in fact--oh, half a dozen! What was she doing there? Did Rodney know? Well, those questions, and others in their train, could wait. But--what was he going to do about it?

As for Rose herself, it was a mere automaton that moved off in the dance and said the two or three lines that remained to her in the act as if nothing had happened, because all her mind and all her capacity for feeling were occupied and tested by something else.

Incredible as it seems, she had utterly overlooked Jimmy--overlooked the fact that, as a dramatic critic, he'd be certain to be present at the opening performance of _The Girl Up-stairs_--certain to be sitting close to the front, and certain, of course, to recognize her the moment she came on the stage. She hadn't even had him in mind when the fear lest some one of Rodney's friends might, for a lark, drop in at the Globe and recognize her, had led her to tell John Galbraith that she couldn't be in the sextette. Since that question had been settled, she'd hardly considered the possibility at all. And, during the three weeks before the opening, since she'd embarked on her career as a costumer, she literally hadn't given it a thought.

She had dreaded various things as the hour of the opening performance drew near--reasonable things like the failure of the piece to please, the reception of their offerings in a chilly silence intensified by contemptuous little riffles of applause. (She had been in audiences which had treated plays like that--taken her own part in the expression of chill disfavor, and she knew now she could never do it again.) She had dreaded unreasonable things, like the total failure of any audience to appear and the necessity of playing to empty rows as they had done in rehearsal; nightmare things, like a total loss of memory, which should leave her stranded in the middle of a silent stage before a jeering audience. But it hadn't occurred to her to dread that the rise of the curtain would reveal to her any of the faces that belonged to a world which the last six weeks had already made to seem unreal.

So the sight of Jimmy Wallace had something the effect that a sudden awakening has on a somnambulist--bewilderment at first, and after that a sort of panic. Her first thought was that she must get word to him, somehow, before he left the theater. Unless she could do that, what was to prevent his going straight to Rodney, to-night, and telling him all about it? He was under no obligation not to do it. He was Rodney's friend quite as much as he was hers.

It didn't take her long to make up her mind though that he wouldn't do that. Jimmy was never precipitate. He'd give her a chance. To-morrow morning would do. She could call him up at his office.

But as she began formulating her request and phrasing the preface of explanations she'd have to make before she'd be--well, entitled to ask a favor of him, she found herself in a difficulty. She didn't want to enter into a secret with him--with any man, this meant, of course--against Rodney. She couldn't think of any way of stating her reason for wanting her husband kept in the dark that didn't seem to slight him, belittle him, make him faintly ridiculous--like the pussy-cat John Galbraith had snapped his fingers at.

So she came, rather swiftly indeed, to the decision (she had arrived at it before Jimmy left the theater) that she wouldn't make any appeal to him at all. She'd do nothing that could lead him to think, either that she was ashamed of herself, or that she was afraid Rodney would be ashamed of her. In the absence of any appeal from her, mightn't he perhaps decide that Rodney was in her confidence and so say nothing about it? But even if he should tell Rodney ...

In her conscious thoughts she went no further than that; didn't recognize the hope already beating tumultuously in her veins, that he would tell Rodney--that perhaps even before she got back to her dismal little room, Rodney, pacing his, would know.

It was so irrational a hope--so unexpected and so well disguised--that she mistook it for a fear. But fear never made one's heart glow like that.

That's where all her thoughts were when John Galbraith halted her on the way to the dressing-room after the performance was over.