lts with convincing
vivacity at their little dinners afterward. There was no thoroughfare
there.

She knew too, what sort of life she'd have to face if she offered
herself out in the West Side factory district as a cracker packer, a
chocolate dipper, a glove stitcher; any of those things. You got a sort
of training, of course, at any one of these trades. You learned to
develop a certain uncanny miraculous speed and skill in some one small
operation, as remorseless and unvaried as the coming into mesh and out
again of two cogs in a pair of gears. But the very highest skill could
just about be made to keep you alive, and it led to nothing else. You
wore out your body and asphyxiated your soul.

Rose didn't mean to do that. She was holding both body and soul in
trust. The penitential mood that had resulted from her talk with Portia
was utterly gone. She wasn't looking for hurts. Deliberately to impose
tortures on herself was as far from her intent as shirking any of the
inevitable trials that should come to her in the course of the day's
work. The only way she could see to a life of decent self-respecting
independence lay through some sort of special training--business
training, she thought. She'd begin by learning to be a stenographer--a
cracking good stenographer. Miss Beach had begun that way. She had a
real job.

Only, Rose had first to get a job that would pay for her training; and
not only pay for it, but leave time for it; a problem which might have
seemed like the problem of lifting yourself by your boot straps, if it
hadn't been for Jimmy Wallace--Jimmy with his talk about chorus-girls.

The trouble with that profession, Jimmy had said, was that the
indispensable assets in it were not industry, intelligence, ambitions,
but a reasonably presentable pair of arms and legs (a good-looking face
would surely come in handy too) and a rudimentary sense of rhythm.
Another demoralizing thing about it, he had said, was the fact that the
work wasn't hard enough, except during rehearsal, to keep its votaries
out of mischief.

When the notion first occurred to her that these statements of Jimmy's
might some day have an interest for her that was personal rather than
academic, she had dismissed it with a shrug of good-humored amusement.
It wasn't until her idea of leaving Rodney and going out and making a
living and a life for herself had hardened into a fixed resolution, and
she had begun serious consideration of ways and