hat back at the
beginning of things, they had had their voices tried by the musical
director, who had conducted three or four music rehearsals before John
Galbraith arrived. They had never had any music to sing from but there
had been half a dozen mimeograph copies of the words to the songs, which
the girls had put their heads together over in groups of three or four,
and more or less learned. What had become of this dope, and whether it
was still available for Rose in case she were animated by a purely
supererogatory desire to study it, the girl didn't know.

She was a pale-haired girl, whom Rose thought she had heard addressed as
Larson, and she had emerged rather slowly as an individual personality,
out of the ruck of the chorus; a fact in her favor, really, because the
girls who had first driven themselves home to Rose through the shell of
her intense preoccupation with doing what John Galbraith wanted, had
been the vividly and viciously objectionable ones. The thing that had
prompted her to sit down beside Larson and, with this question about how
one learned the words to the songs, take her first real step toward an
acquaintance, was an absence of any strong dislike, rather than the
presence of a real attraction.

She made a surprising discovery when the girl, with a friendly pat on
the sofa beside her, for an invitation to her to sit down, began
answering her question. She was a real beauty. Or, more accurately, she
possessed the constituent qualities of beauty. She was pure English
eighteenth century; might have stepped down out of a Gainsborough
portrait. Dressed right, and made up a little, with her effects
legitimately heightened (and warned not to speak), she could have gone
to the Charity Ball as the Honorable Mrs. Graham, and Bertie Willis
would have gone mad about her. Only you had to look twice at her to
perceive that this was so; and what she lacked was just the unanalyzable
quality that makes one look twice.

Her speaking voice would have driven Bertie mad, too--foaming, biting
mad. It was disconcertingly loud, in the first place, and it came
out upon the promontories of speech with a flat whang that fairly
made you jump. Its undulations of pitch gave you something the same
sensation as riding rapidly over a worn-out asphalt pavement in a
five-hundred-dollar automobile; unforeseen springs into the air,
descents into unexpected pits. Her grammar wasn't flagrantly bad, though
it had, rather pitiably, a