e executed--a sort of stiff-legged
skip accompanied by a vulgar hip wriggle and concluding with a
straight-out sidewise kick.

A sick disgust clutched at Rose as she watched--an utter revulsion from
the whole loathly business. She could scrub floors--starve if she had
to. She couldn't do the thing he demanded of her here out in the middle
of the floor, in her street clothes, without the excuse of music to make
it tolerable--and before that row of leering faces.

"Well?" he asked, turning to her as he finished. He wasn't smiling at
all.

"I'm not dressed to do that," she said.

"I know you're not," he admitted coolly, "but it can be done. Pick up
your skirts and do it as you are,--if you really want a job."

There was just a faint edge of contempt in that last phrase and,
mercifully, it roused her anger. A blaze kindled in her blue eyes, and
two spots of vivid color defined themselves in her cheeks.

She caught up her skirts as he had told her to do, executed without
compromise the stiff-legged skip and the wriggle, and finished with a
horizontal sidewise kick that matched his own. Then, panting, trembling
a little, she stood looking straight into his face.

The first thing she realized when the processes of thought began again
was that even if there had been a hoax, she was not, in the event, the
victim of it. The attitude of her audience told her that. Galbraith was
staring at her with a look that expressed at first, clear astonishment,
but gradually complicated itself with other emotions--confusion, a glint
of whimsical amusement. That gleam, a perfectly honest, kindly one,
decided Rose to take him on trust. He wasn't a brute, however it might
suit his purposes to act like one. And with an inkling of how her blaze
of wrath must be amusing him, she smiled slowly and a little
uncertainly, herself.

"We've been rehearsing this piece two weeks," he said presently, looking
away from her when he began to talk, "and I couldn't take any one into
the chorus now whom I'd have to teach the rudiments of dancing to. I
must have people who can do what I tell them. That's why a test was
necessary. Also, from now on, it would be a serious thing to lose
anybody out of the chorus. I couldn't take anybody who had come down
here--for a lark."

"It's not a lark to me," said Rose.

Now he looked around at her again. "I know it isn't," he said. "But I
thought when you first came in here, that it was."

With that, Rose understo