that is the _sine qua non_ for a real teacher. And that, of
course, was Rose all over.

Those four sulky, rather supercilious chorus-girls, coming to Rose under
a threat of dismissal, for lessons in the one last thing that a
free-born American will submit to dictation about, might not want to
learn, nor mean to learn, but they couldn't help learning. You couldn't
be unaware of Rose and, being aware of her, you couldn't resist doing
things as she wanted you to.

Informally, too, she taught them other things than speech. "Here,
Waldron!" Galbraith would say. "This is no cake-walk. All you've got to
do is to cross to that chair and sit down in it like a lady. Show her
how to do it, Dane." And Rose, with her good-humored disarming smile at
the infuriated Waldron, would go ahead and do it.

I won't pretend that she was a favorite with the other members of the
sextette, barring Olga. But she managed to avoid being cordially hated,
which was a very solid personal triumph.

I have said that there were two small incidents destined to have a
powerful influence at this time, in Rose's life. One of them I have told
you about--the chance that led her to teach Olga Larson to talk. The
other concerned itself with a certain afternoon frock in a Michigan
Avenue shop.

The owners of _The Girl Up-stairs_ were very inadequately experienced in
the business of putting on musical comedies. Galbraith spoke of them as
amateurs, and couldn't, really, have described them better. Your
professional gambler--for musical-comedy producing is an especially
sporting form of gambling and nothing else--assesses his chances in
advance, decides coolly whether they are worth taking or not, and then,
with a steely indifference awaits the event. The amateur, on the
contrary, is always fluttering between an insane confidence and a
shuddering despair; between a reckless disregard of money and a foolish
attempt to save it. It had been in one of their hot fits that the owners
of _The Girl Up-stairs_ had retained Galbraith. The news item Rose had
read had not exceeded truth in saying that he was one of the three
greatest directors in the country. They couldn't have got him out to
Chicago at all but for the chance that he was, just then, at the end of
a long-time contract with the Shumans and holding off for better terms
before he signed a new one. The owners were staggered at the prices they
had to pay him, at that, but they recovered and were still blowing w