job, prevailed on Galbraith to dress her
properly, and won her a chance for the space of that one song refrain,
to make her individual appeal to the audience--Rose, who had done all
this, was now going out as a chorus-girl in the company of which Olga
was the leading woman. She didn't regret Olga's promotion, but she did
wish, for herself, that she might have been spared just now, this ironic
little cackle of laughter on the part of the malicious Goddess of
Chance.

She was ashamed of the feeling--was she getting as small as that?--and,
in consequence, she congratulated Olga a good deal more warmly than
otherwise she would have done. But this warmer manner of hers opened
Olga's flood-gates so wide, swamped her in such a torrent of sentiment,
that Rose simply took to flight.

There was an element of real maternal pity in Rose's adoption of little
Dolly Darling as her chum. Dolly was obviously as fragile and ephemeral
as a transparent sand-fly. She had nothing that you could call a mind or
a character, even of the most rudimentary sort. She knew nothing, except
how to dance, and she knew that exactly as a kitten knows how to play
with a ball of string; she dreamed of diamonds and wonderful restaurants
and a sardonic hero nine feet tall with a straight nose and a long chin,
who would clutch her passionately in his arms (there was no more real
passion in her than there is in a soap-bubble) and murmur vows of
eternal adoration in her ears.

She was a soap-bubble; that's the figure for her; just an iridescent
reflection, wondrously distorted, of the tawdry life about her--a
reflection, and then nothing!

But just the thin empty frailness of her, her gaiety in the face of
perfectly inevitable destruction, appealed to Rose. She had Dolly in her
pocket in five minutes, and before the end of the rehearsal, their
treaty was signed and sealed. They were to be chums, bosom friends! The
notion of it gave Rose the most spontaneous smile she'd had in days; the
first one that hadn't had a bitter quirk in it.

When, down at the union station on Sunday morning, as they were leaving,
Olga unfolded her plan that she and Rose should room together, Rose
owned up to herself that there had been another element than maternal
pity in her adoption of Dolly. She'd suspected that Olga would propose
something of this sort, and she had fortified herself against it.

Olga was furious, of course, when she learned what Rose had done, and
accused