barred. A girl could let a man come up to her on a platform where they
were all gathered waiting for the train, and casually slide an arm
around her, without any one's paying the slightest attention to the act.
But if, when the train came along, she permitted him to pick up her
suit-case, carry it into the train and find a seat for her, there would
be nods and glances.

Well, you got into the train and dozed and read a magazine (or both) and
by and by, when everybody else did, you got up and got out. Perhaps you
waited on a triangular railway platform for another train, or perhaps
you trailed along in a procession, to a hotel. In the latter case, you
got a meal and found out where the opera-house was.

There were various minor occupations that you slipped into the
interstices of a day like this whenever they happened to come. You
combed out and brushed your hair (a hundred strokes) which you were too
tired to do at night after the performance and seldom waked up in time
for in the morning. And, if you were wise, as Rose was, thanks to a tip
from Anabel, and had emancipated yourself from the horror of overnight
laundries by providing yourself with crepe underclothes and dark little
silk blouses, you got all the hot water you could beg of the
chambermaid, and did the family wash in the bowl in your room, on an
afternoon when you had a short jump and there was no matinee.

It was a life, of course, that abounded in what pass for hardships.
There is no desolation to surpass that of the second-best hotel (rates
two dollars a day), in a small middle western city, except the same kind
of hotel in the same sort of city in the South. Bad air, bad beds and
bad food are their staples and what passes for service seems especially
calculated to encourage the victim to dispense with it as far as
possible. The stages and dressing-rooms in the theaters were almost
always dirty and were frequently overrun with rats. It was always cold
and drafty back there, except when it happened to be suffocating. Also,
the day's work by no means invariably concluded with even a half a bed
in a two-dollar-a-day hotel. If there happened to be a train coming
along at two o'clock in the morning, and also happened to be a chance to
play a matinee in the town you were jumping to, you took your suit-case
to the theater, lugged it from there after the performance, to the
station, and spent an indefinite number of hours thereafter, in an
air-tight waiting-r