oom. Waiting, be it observed, for a chance to curl up
in a seat in the day-coach, when the train came along.

But Rose didn't mind this very much. The rooms assigned to her and her
roommate were fully as comfortable as the one she had lived in on Clark
Street, and the meals, as a whole, were rather better than those her
habitual lunch-room had provided. As for riding on the train: it gave
you the sense of doing something and getting somewhere, without imposing
the necessity either for judgment or for resolution. The real
discomforts to Rose were not the material ones.

The piece had been, as she discovered during the one rehearsal she had
attended in Chicago, deliberately cheapened and vulgarized for the road.
The only one of the principals who had a shred of professional
reputation, was a comedian named Max Webber, who played the part of the
cosmetic king. He'd come up in vaudeville and his methods reeked of it.
He was featured in the billing and he arrogated all the privileges of a
real star. He was intensely and destructively jealous of any approbation
he didn't himself arouse, even if it was manifested when he was not on
the stage. He distended his part out of all reasonable semblance, and to
the practical annihilation of the plot, by the injection into it of
musty vaudeville specialties of his, which he assured the weak-kneed
management were knock-outs. And his clowning and mugging made it
impossible to play a legitimate scene with him, with any shadow of
professional self-respect.

The result of this was that the girl who had rehearsed Patricia
Devereux's part, an ambitious, well-equipped young woman who would have
added much-needed strength to the cast, delivered an ultimatum during
the last rehearsal but one, and on having her very reasonable demands
rejected, walked out. Olga Larson, who had understudied Patricia ever
since the Chicago opening, was given the part. The rest of the
principals were either pathetic failures with lamentable stories of
better days, or promising youngsters, like Olga herself, with no
adequate training.

The chorus was similarly constituted. There were fifteen girls in it,
including the sextette, now a trio, part of them worn-out veterans (one
of these was the duchess--do you remember her?--who had applied to
Galbraith for a job the day that Rose got hers) and the others green
young girls, not more than sixteen or seventeen, some of them, who had
never been on the stage before. It