ed up from his finger-nails and shot an
inquiring glance through the grille.

What he saw betrayed him into an involuntary stare. He didn't mean to
stare; he meant to be respectful. But he was surprised. Rose, in the
plainest suit that she could hope would seem plausible to her servants
for a traveling costume to California, an ulster and a little beaver hat
with a quill in it, had no misgivings about looking the part of a
potentially hard-working young woman renting a three-dollar room on
North Clark Street and seeking employment in a musical-comedy chorus. A
realization that her neat black seal dressing-case wasn't quite in the
picture, helped to account for the landlady's puzzlement about her. But
it hadn't been introduced in evidence here. And yet the young man behind
the grille seemed as surprised as the landlady.

He repeated his answer to her question with the lubricant of a few more
words and a fatuous sort of smile. "I believe they rehearse in the North
End Hall this afternoon."

Rose couldn't help smiling a little herself. "I'm afraid," she said,
"I'll have to ask where that is."

"Not at all," said the young man idiotically, and he told her the
address; then cast about for a slip of paper to write it down on,
racking his thimbleful of brains all the while to make out who she could
be. She wasn't one of the principals in the company. They'd all reported
and he hadn't heard that any of them was to be replaced.

"Oh, you needn't write it," said Rose. "I can remember, thank you." She
gave him a pleasant sort of boyish nod that didn't classify at all with
anything in his experience, and walked out of the lobby.

He stared after her almost resentfully, feeling all mussed up, somehow,
and inadequate; as if here had been a situation that he had failed
signally to make the most of. He sat there for the next half-hour
gloomily thinking up things he might have said to her.

CHAPTER II

THE EVENING AND THE MORNING WERE THE FIRST DAY

With her umbrella over her shoulder, Rose set sail northward again
through the rain, absurdly cheered; first by the fact that the opening
skirmish had distinctly, though intangibly, gone her way; secondly by
the small bit of luck that North End Hall would be, judging by its
number on North Clark Street, not more than a block or two from her
three-dollar room.

The sight of the entrance to it gave her a pang of misgiving. A pair of
white painted doors opened from the stree