lear to Galbraith and the musical
director, just how much of the stage in every direction, her dances were
going to occupy and precisely the _tempi_ at which they were to be
executed. In a word, if her work had no more emotional value than a
mechanical drawing, it did have the precision of one.

Rose mightn't have appreciated tins, had she not seen and admired Miss
Devereux from the front in a production she and Rodney had been two or
three times to see the season before.

Little Anabel Astor presented as striking a contrast to all this as it
would be possible to imagine. She, too, had attained a good deal of
celebrity in the musical-comedy world--was to be one of the features of
the cast. She'd come up from the ranks of the chorus. She'd been one of
the ponies, years ago, in some of George M. Cohan's productions, and she
was still just a chorus-girl. But a chorus-girl raised to the third, or
fourth, or, if you like, the _n_th power. She had an electric grin, and
a perfectly boundless vitality, which she spent as freely on rehearsals
as on performances. She always dressed for rehearsals just as the chorus
did, in a middy-blouse and bloomers, and she worked as hard as they did,
and even more ungrudgingly.

She was a pretty little thing, with nothing very feminine about
her--even her voice had a harsh boyish quality--and she never looked
prettier to Rose than when, her face flushed with an hour's honest toil,
she would wipe the copious sweat of it off with her sleeve, and panting,
look up with a smile at John Galbraith and an expectant expression,
waiting for his next command, which reminded Rose of the look of a
terrier alert for the stick his master means to throw for him. Her
speech was unaffectedly that of a Milwaukee Avenue gamin, and it served
adequately and admirably as a vehicle for the expression of her emotions
and ideas.

She formed her likes and dislikes with a complete disregard of the
social or professional importance of the objects of them. She took an
immediate liking to Rose; gave her some valuable hints on dancing, took
to calling her "dearie" before the end of the second rehearsal and, with
her arm around her, confided to her in terms of blood-curdling
profanity, her opinion of Stewart Lester, the tenor, who played the part
of Dick Benham in the piece.

The queer thing was that she and Patricia were on the best of terms.
They didn't compete, that was it, Rose supposed, and they were both good
enou