highest possible perfection of a distinctly second-rate voice, to a
precise knowledge of its limitations and to a most scrupulous economy in
its effects. Inevitably, then, the raw splendors that Olga Larson
dispensed so prodigally gave Patricia the creeps.

Inevitably, too, without any conscious malice about it, she made up her
clear, hard little mind the moment she heard Olga talk, that she was
utterly impossible for the sextette. "Really, my dear man," she told
Galbraith after the first rehearsal, "you'll have to find some one else.
American audiences will stand a good deal, I know, in the way of
atrocious speech, but positively she'll be hooted. They'll all sound
frightful enough, especially because that Dane girl, if that's her name,
talks like a lady, but this one ...!" She gave a cruelly adequate little
imitation of Olga's delivery of one of her lines. "Like some one who
doesn't know how, trying to play the slide trombone," she commented.

Galbraith couldn't pretend that she exaggerated the horrors of it, but
explained why the girl was indispensable. The explanation didn't please
Patricia any too well, either.

"Sing!" she cried hotly. "But she sings detestably!"

"No doubt," Galbraith admitted, "but she makes a great big noise always
on the right note, and that's what that bunch of penny whistlers can't
do without. Give her a little time," he concluded diplomatically, "and
I'll try to teach her."

"It can't be taught," said Patricia. "That's too much even for you."

So it happened that when Rose came out of her own nightmare, got her
breath and found leisure to look around, she found some one else whose
troubles weren't so transitory. The little scene in the first act,
between Sylvia and the sextette, was held up again and again, endlessly,
it seemed to Rose,--and what must it have seemed to the poor
victim?--while Galbraith bellowed Larson's lines after her, sometimes in
grotesque imitation of her own inflections, sometimes in what was meant
as a pattern for her to follow. The girl whose ear was so wonderfully
sensitive to pitch and rhythm, was simply deaf, it seemed, to the
subtleties of inflection. She reduced Galbraith to helpless wrath, in
her panic, by mistaking now and again, his imitations for his models.
The chorus tittered; the spectators suffocated their guffaws as well as
they could. Patricia grew more and more acutely and infuriatingly ironic
all the while.

Evidently Galbraith didn't mean to