er back.

If this theory were sound, and it had a dreadful plausibility to Rose,
her only chance for keeping her job would be to do as well as Grant
could do, to-night, in this very first rehearsal; and she went out on
the stage in a perfect agony of determination. She must see everything,
hear everything; put all she knew and every ounce of energy she had,
into the endeavor to make John Galbraith forget that she was a recruit
at all.

The intensity of this preoccupation was a wonderful protection to her.
It kept away the sick disgust that had threatened her in the
dressing-room; prevented her even glancing ahead to a future that would,
had she taken to guessing about it, utterly have overwhelmed her. The
intensely illuminated present instant kept her mind focused to its
sharpest edge.

It is true that before she had been working fifteen minutes, she had
forgotten all about Grant and the possibility of her return. She'd even
forgotten her resolution not to let John Galbraith remember she was a
recruit. Indeed, she had forgotten she was a recruit. She was nothing at
all but just a reflection of his will. She'd felt that quality strongly
in him even behind his back during the afternoon rehearsal. Now, on the
stage in front of him, she was completely possessed by it.

She didn't know she was tired, panting, wet all over with sweat. Really,
of course, she was pretty soft, judged by her own athletic standards.
She hadn't done anything so physically exacting as this for over a year.
But she had the illusion that she wasn't _doing_ anything now; that she
was just a passive plastic thing, tossed, flung, swirled about by the
driving power of the director's will. It wouldn't have surprised her if
the chairs had danced for him.

It couldn't of course have occurred to her that she was producing her
own effect on the director; she couldn't have surmised that he was
driving his rehearsal at a faster pace and with a renewed energy and
fire because of the presence, there in the ranks of his chorus, of a
glowing, thrilling creature who devoured his intentions half formed, met
them with a blue spark across the poles of their two minds.

She realized, when the rehearsal was over, that it had gone well and
that it couldn't have gone so if her own part had been done badly. She
hesitated a moment after he'd finally dismissed them with a nod, and an,
"Eleven o'clock to-morrow morning, everybody," from a previously formed
intention of a