t level upon the foot of a
broadish stair which took you up rather suddenly; there was space enough
between the foot of the stair and the doors for a ticket-window, but it
was too small to be called a lobby; an arc lamp hung there though, and
two more--all three were extinct--hung just outside. What gave the place
its air of vulgarity, a suggestion of being the starting and finishing
point for lewd, drink sodden revels, she couldn't determine. It did
suggest this plainly. But, in the light of what Jimmy Wallace had told
her, she didn't think it likely there'd be any reveling to speak of at
rehearsal.

At the head of the stairway, tilted back in a kitchen chair beneath a
single gas-jet whose light he was trying to make suffice for the perusal
of a green newspaper, sat a man, under orders no doubt, to keep
intruders away.

Rose cast about as she climbed for the sort of phrase that would
convince him she wasn't an intruder. She would ask him, but in the
manner of one who seeks a formal assurance merely, if this was where
they were rehearsing _The Girl Up-stairs_. Three steps from the top, she
changed her tactics, as a result of a glance at his unshaven face. The
thing to do was to go by as if he weren't there at all--as if, for such
as she, watchmen didn't exist. The rhythmic pounding of feet and the
frayed chords from a worn-out piano, convinced her she was in the right
place.

Her stratagem succeeded, but not without giving her a bad moment. The
man glanced up and, though she felt he didn't return to his paper again,
he made no attempt to stop her. But right before her was another pair of
big white doors, closed with an effect of permanence--locked, she
suspected. A narrower door to the left stood open, but over it was
painted the disconcerting legend "Bar," flanked on either side, to make
the matter explicit even to the unlearned, by pictorial representations
of glasses of foaming beer. She hadn't time to deliberate over her
choice. The watchman's eyes were boring into her back. If she chose
wrong, or if she visibly hesitated, she knew she'd hear a voice say,
"Here! Where you going!"

She caught a quick breath, turned to the left and walked steadily
through the narrower door into the bar. It proved to be a deserted,
shrouded, sinister-looking place, with an interminable high mahogany
counter at one side, and with a lot of little iron tables placed by
pairs, their tops together, so that half of them had their legs