didn't actually smile, but there was in her face a humorous
appreciation of the fact that a mountain like this wouldn't be hard to
watch.

The doorman grinned back at her. "Sure I will," he said. "I'm sorry I
can't leave the door to get you a cab."

Rose hailed one that happened to be passing, a creaking,
mud-bespattered disreputable affair with a driver to match, and briskly
drove a bargain with him. He announced when she told him the address
that the fare would be a dollar and a half. She offered him seventy-five
cents, which he, with the air of a disillusioned optimist in a bitter
world, accepted. "Christmas, too!" he muttered ironically.

"Oh, come," said Rose, grinning up at him. "How many tired people have
you given free rides to to-day, on the strength of that?"

"All right, miss; I don't complain," he said. He did, though, but
humorously, when Rose, assisted by a page boy the doorman had impressed
for her, carried the dressmaker's form and the other heavy bundle out to
the curb. He declared the form should go as another passenger (its
semi-human shape was clearly visible through the wrappings) and that the
other bundle ought to have a van. All the same, when at her destination
Rose had paid him, he came down, voluntarily from the box--voluntarily
but with a sort of reluctance--and carried the form up to her room for
her.

Also, rather incredibly, he refused an extra quarter she had ready for
him when he had completed this service. "Just to show no ill feelings,"
he said, and he told her where his stand was and gave himself a little
recommendation: "Honest and reliable."

Here in her close little room, the suggestion of an alcoholic basis for
this generosity obtruded itself, but Rose didn't care. She wished him a
merry Christmas and waved him off with a smile.

It was now after eight o'clock. Rehearsal was at eight-thirty and she
had had nothing to eat since noon. But she stole the time, nevertheless,
to tear the wrappings off her "form" and gaze on its respectable
nakedness for two or three minutes with a contemplative eye. Then,
reluctantly--it was the first time she had left that room with
reluctance--she turned out the light and hurried off to the little
lunch-room that lay on the way to the dance-hall.

She never again, in the active practise of her profession, knew
anything quite like the ensuing seventy-two hours. Every stimulus was,
of course, abnormally heightened. There was the novelty, the th