he'd discovered how she made sounds herself and
had, with the aid of a hand mirror, developed a rough-and-ready
technique for demonstrating how it was done. She remembered, with bitter
regret, a course she had dozed through at the university, dreaming about
the half-back, which, had she only listened to the professor instead,
would be doing her solid service now. Had there been other courses like
that, she wondered vaguely? Had the education she had spent fifteen
years or so on an actual relation to life after all? It was a startling
idea.

She walked Olga out to the park and back at seven-thirty, and at eight
they were up in her room again. They raided the delicatessen at eleven
o'clock, and made an exiguous meal on the plunder. And at twelve, husky
of voice, but indomitable of mind, they, with the others, confronted
Galbraith upon the stage in North End Hall.

"Do you suppose," Olga said during the preliminary bustle of getting
started, "that he's put any one else in my part already?"

It was a fear Rose had entertained, but had avoided suggesting to her
pupil.

"I don't believe so," she said. "If he has, I'll talk to him."

"No, you won't!" said Olga. "I'll talk to him myself."

There was a ring to that decision that did Rose's heart good. It took a
long time to get that northern blood on fire, but when you did, you
could count on its not going cold again overnight.

It got pretty exciting of course, as the scene between Sylvia and the
sextette drew near, and when it came, Rose could hardly manage her own
first line--hung over it a second, indeed, before she could make her
voice work at all, and drew a sharp look of inquiry from Galbraith. But
on Olga's first cue, her line was spoken with no hesitation at all, and
in tone, pitch and inflection, it was almost a phonographic copy of the
voice that had served it for a model.

There was a solid two seconds of silence. For once in her life Patricia
Devereux had missed a cue!

John Galbraith had been an acrobat as well as a dancer, and he was
quick on his feet. He had just turned, unexpectedly, an intellectual
somersault, but he landed cleanly and without a stagger. "Come, Miss
Devereux," he said, "that's your line." And the scene went on.

But when, about four o'clock that afternoon, the rehearsal was over,
Galbraith called Olga out to him and allowed himself a long incredulous
stare at her. "Will you tell me, Larson," he asked, "why in the name of
Heaven, if