touch of the genteel about it. But now, when
she spoke to Rose, and with the lassitude of fatigue in her voice
besides, Rose heard something friendly about it.

"I don't know what you should worry about any of that stuff for," she
said. "How you sing or what you sing don't make much difference."

Rose admitted that it didn't seem to. "But you see," she said (she
hadn't had a human soul to talk to for more than a week and she had to
make a friend of somebody); "you see, I've just got to keep this job.
And if every little helps, as they say, perhaps that would."

The girl looked at her oddly, almost suspiciously, as if for a moment
she had doubted whether Rose had spoken in good faith. "You've got as
good a chance of losing your job," she said, "as Galbraith has of losing
his."

"I don't worry about it," said Rose, "when I'm up there on the stage at
work. It's too exciting. And then, I feel somehow that it's going all
right. But early in the morning, I get to imagining all sorts of things.
He's so terribly sudden. The girl whose place I got,--she hadn't any
warning, you know. It just happened."

The Larson girl gave a decisive little nod. Not so much, it seemed, in
assent to what Rose had just said, but as if some question in her own
mind had been answered.

"You'll get used to that feeling," she said. "You've got to take a
chance anyway, so why worry? We can work our heads off, but if the piece
is a fliv the opening night, they'll tack up the notice, and there we'll
be with two weeks' pay for eight weeks' work, and another six weeks'
work for nothing in something else if we're lucky enough to get it."

This was a possibility Rose hadn't thought of. "But--that isn't fair!"
she said.

The other girl laughed grimly. "Fair!" she echoed. "What they want to
print that word in the dictionary for, I don't see. Because what it
means don't exist. Not where I live, anyway. But what's the good of
making a fuss about it? We've got to take our chance like everybody
else."

"I don't believe this piece will fall, though," said Rose. "I don't
think Mr. Galbraith would let it. I think he's a perfect wonder, don't
you?"

The Larson girl looked at her again. "He's supposed to be about the best
in the business," she said, "and I guess he is." She added, "Dave tells
me he's going to put you with us in the sextette."

Dave was the thick pianist, and Rose had found him in the highest degree
obnoxious. He seemed to occupy an indet