le--a conscious exertion of
all the power Rose possessed. She learned, for the first time, what the
weight of an immense melancholy inertia like that can be. The girl was
like one paralyzed. She was willing enough to talk. She told Rose the
whole story of her life; not as one making confidences to a friend;
rather with the curious detachment of a melancholy spectator discussing
an unfortunate life she had no concern with.

She knew how good her voice was, and, equally, how badly it needed
training. She'd had, always, a passionate desire to sing and a belief in
her possibilities. If she could get a chance, she could succeed. She'd
undergone heartbreaking privations, trying to save money enough out of
her earnings at one form of toil after another, to take lessons. But,
repeatedly, these small savings had, by some disaster, been swept away:
stolen once, by a worthless older brother; absorbed on another occasion
by her mother's fatal illness. Two years ago she had drifted into the
chorus, but had been altogether unlucky in her various ventures. She
wasn't naturally graceful--had been slow learning to dance. Again and
again, she'd been dropped at the end of three or four weeks of rehearsal
(gratuitous of course) and seen another girl put in her place. When this
hadn't happened, the shows she had been in had failed after a few weeks'
life.

When Galbraith had put her into the sextette in _The Girl Up-stairs_, a
hope, just about dead, had been awakened. She'd at last learned to dance
well enough to escape censure and she had seen for herself how
indispensable her singing voice was to the group. And then it had
appeared she'd have to talk! And, inexplicably to herself, her talking
wasn't right. The thing had just been another mirage. It was hopeless.
Galbraith would put her back into the chorus--drop her, likely enough,
altogether.

The thing that at first exasperated Rose and later, as she came vaguely
to understand it, aroused both her pity and her determination, was the
girl's strange, dully fatalistic acquiescence in it all. The sort of
circumstances that in Rose herself set the blood drumming through her
arteries, keyed her will to the very highest pitch, quickened her brain,
made her feel in some inexplicable way, confident and irresistible, laid
on this girl a paralyzing hand. It wasn't her fault that she didn't meet
her difficulties half-way with a vicious, driving offensive--rout them,
demoralize them. It was her t