the
last quarter century, discovered a number--one or two of them
authentically of the first magnitude.

It would have simplified matters immensely if he could have seen Rose in
this category. But the stubborn fact was, he couldn't. She couldn't sing
a bit, and marked as her natural talent was for dancing, she hadn't
begun young enough ever to master the technique of it. That left acting;
but he doubted if she could ever go very far at that. Salient as her
personality was, she hadn't the instinct for putting it over. Or, if she
had it, she distrusted it. She was handicapped, too, by her sense of
humor. A real star in the egg, wouldn't have stopped in the middle of
that first fine blaze of wrath he'd seen, to join him in smiling at it.
A real actress wouldn't have spent her energies teaching another woman
to talk, nor persuading him to buy another woman a beautiful frock. The
focus had to be sharper than that. The only way you got the drive it
took to spell your name in electric lights, was by subordinating
everything else to the projection of yourself, treating your
surroundings, with irresistible conviction, merely as a background. This
girl could never do that.

Yet the notion wouldn't leave his mind that she could do something, and
do it more than commonly well. She must have an instinct of her own for
effects to enable her to understand so instantaneously what he was
trying to do. And once in a while, especially lately, he'd seen, over
some experiment of his, a flash of dissent across her eager face which
gave him the preposterous idea that by asking her--asking a
chorus-girl!--he might get a suggestion worth thinking about.

Certainly she had helped him in another way, there was no doubt of that.
That sextette, thanks to her teaching, would be the smartest, best
mannered bunch of chorus-girls that had adorned a production of his in a
long, long time.

And here, perhaps, he came closer than anywhere else to an understanding
of the source of the girl's attraction for him. John Galbraith could
remember the time when, a nameless little rat of a cockney, he had slept
under London bridges, opened cab doors for half-pence, carried links on
foggy nights. By the clear force of genius he had made his way up from
that;--from throwing cart-wheels for the amusement of the queues waiting
at the pit entrances of theaters, from the ribald knock-about of East
End halls, from the hilarity of Drury Lane pantomimes. Professionall