ragedy.

"All right," Rose apostrophized them grimly. "This time you're up
against me."

"Look here!" she said to Olga, when the story was told (this was across
the table in the dingy lunch-room where, as Doris Dane, she had had her
first meal, and most of her subsequent ones), "look here, and listen to
what I'm going to tell you. I know what I'm talking about. You're going
to learn to say your lines before to-morrow's rehearsal, so that Mr. ...
So that Galbraith won't stop you once." (This was a trick of speech that
came hard to Rose, but she was gradually learning it.) "We're going up
to my room now, and I'm going to teach you. We've got lots of time.
Rehearsal to-morrow isn't till twelve o'clock. You're going to stay in
the sextette, and when the piece opens, you're going to make a hit."

She hesitated a moment, then added in the same blunt matter-of-fact way,
"You're one of the most beautiful women in Chicago. Did you know that?
Dressed right and with your hair done right, you could make them stare.
Have you finished your coffee? Then come along. Here! Give me your part.
You don't want to lose it."

For the girl, pitiably, almost ludicrously, was staring at Rose in a
sort of somnambulistic daze. She hadn't been hypnotized, but she might
about as well have been, for any real resistance her mind, or her will,
could offer to her new friend's vibrant confidence.

She went with Rose up to the little three-dollar room. Rose put her into
a chair, sat down opposite her, took the first phrase of her first
speech, and said it very slowly, very quietly, half a dozen times. That
was at half past eleven o'clock at night. By midnight, Olga could say
those first three words, if not to Rose's complete satisfaction, at
least a lot better. She went on and finished the sentence. They worked
straight through the night, except that two or three times the girl
broke down; said it was hopeless. She got up once and said that she was
going home, whereupon Rose locked the door and put the key in her
stocking. She sulked once, and for fifteen minutes wouldn't say a word.
But by seven o'clock in the morning, when they went back to the
lunch-room and ate an enormous breakfast, Olga's sluggish blood was
fired at last. It was a profane thought, but you _could_ take the Fatal
Sisters by the hair and coerce a change in the pattern they were
weaving.

And Rose, by that time, by the plain brute force of necessity, was a
teacher of phonetics. S