greement with you. She's got about six lines to
say, and she wants to change two of them."

"What are your changes, Dane?" Galbraith asked.

Queerly enough, the curt seriousness of his speech was immensely
grateful to her--suggested that she perhaps hadn't been, wholly anyhow,
the object of his derision before.

"I only thought," said Rose, "that if instead of saying, 'My gracious,
Sylvia!' I said, 'Sylvia, _dear_!' or something like that, it would
sound a little more natural. And if I said, 'I _do_ wish, Sylvia'
instead of, 'I wish to goodness, Sylvia ...'"

She had said it all straight to the author.

"I suppose," he said, sneering very hard, "that your own personal
knowledge of the way society women talk is what leads you to believe
that your phrases are better than mine?"

"Yes," said Rose, serenely matter-of-fact, "it is."

Sarcasm is an uncertain sort of pop-gun. You never can tell from which
end it's going to go off.

"I don't know," said Miss Devereux, turning now a deadly smile on him,
"whether Miss--what's-her-name--agrees with me or not. But, do you know,
I agree with her."

"Oh, I don't care a _damn_!" said Mr. Harold Mills. "Go as far as you
like. I don't recognize the piece now. What it'll be when you--butchers
get through with it ...!" He flung out his hands and stalked away.

"Go find Mr. Quan," said Galbraith to Rose, "and tell him to mark those
changes of yours in the book. Tell him I said so."

It was, though, a pretty unsatisfactory victory. Everybody was grinning;
for the tale spread fast, and while Rose knew it wasn't primarily at
her, her sensations were those of a perfectly serious, well-meaning
child, in adult company, who, in all innocence has just made a remark
which, for some reason incomprehensible to him, has convulsed one member
of it with fury, and the others with laughter. More or less she could
imagine where the joke lay. Harold had evidently been quarreling with
pretty much all of the principals, over more or less necessary changes
in his precious text, until everybody was rather on edge about it,
loaded and primed for all sorts of explosions; when, cheerfully along
came Rose, a perfectly green young chorus-girl, unsuspectingly carrying
the match for the mine, or the straw for the camel, whichever way you
wanted to put it.

She wouldn't have minded the way she had blundered into the focus of
public attention, if, in other particulars, the rehearsal had been
going well wi