minious
reduction to the ranks.

"That matter of putting your voice over, Dane," he said, to her
amazement quite casually, "is just a question of thinking where you want
it to go. If you'll imagine a target against the back wall over there,
and will your voice to hit it, whatever direction you're speaking in,
and however softly you speak, you will be heard. If you forget the
target and think you're talking to the person on the stage you're
supposed to be talking to, you won't be heard. Say your lines over to me
now, without raising your voice or looking out there. But keep the
target in mind."

Rose said all the lines she had in the whole three acts. It didn't take
a minute. He nodded curtly. "You've got the idea." He added, just as she
turned away, "You were quite right to suggest those changes. They're an
improvement."

That rehearsal marked the nadir of Rose's career at the Globe. From then
on, she was steadily in the ascendent, not only in John Galbraith's good
graces, which was all of course that mattered. She won, it appeared, a
sort of tolerant esteem from some of the principals, and even the owners
themselves spoke to her pleasantly.

They entertained her vastly, now that a confidence in her ability to do
her own part left her leisure to look around a bit. The contrast between
the two leading women, Patricia Devereux, who played the title part, and
little Anabel Astor, who played the mercenary seductress, was a piquant
source of speculation. As far as speech and manners went, Miss Devereux
might have been a born citizen of the world Rose had been naturalized
into by her marriage with Rodney; in fact, she reminded her rather
strikingly of Harriet. She was cool, brusk, hard finished, and, as was
evident from Galbraith's manifest satisfaction with her, thoroughly
workmanly and competent. Yet she never seemed really to work in
rehearsal. She gave no more than a bare outline of what she was going to
do. But the outline, in all its salient angles, was perfectly
indicated. She rehearsed in her ordinary street clothes, with her hat
on, and as often as not, with a wrist-bag in one hand. She neither
danced, sang, nor acted. But she had her part letter perfect before any
of the other principals. She never missed a cue, and though she sang off
the top of her voice, and let the confines of a very scant little tailor
skirt mark the limits of her dancing, she sang her songs in perfect
tempo and always made it completely c