her, with a measure of justice, of having done it to be rid of
her. If Rose didn't want to remain under this imputation, she could
break with Dolly. When Rose refused to do this, Olga cut her off
utterly; damned her, disowned her. They were the first pair in the
company to begin not to speak.

As I said, the chief discomforts for Rose in those first ten days on the
road, were not the material ones. Olga's absurd way of ignoring her, the
fact that she attributed their quarrel, for the benefit of the company,
to Rose's jealousy of her success; worst of all, the fact that Rose
couldn't be sure she wasn't jealous of Olga's success, didn't feel at
least, contemplating their reversed positions, more like a failure than
she would have felt had the original girl kept the leading part,--all
this contributed to a discomfort that did matter, that tormented,
abraded, rankled.

It became the core of a sensation that she had turned cheap and shabby;
that the distinction, which with her first entrance into this life, she
had built up between herself and most of her colleagues, was breaking
down; that her fiber was coarsening, her fine sensitiveness becoming
calloused. It troubled her that she should feel so languid an
indifference over the vulgarity of the piece, a vulgarity which, under
Webber's infection, grew more blatant every day.

It was obvious to her that this quality was destroying whatever slim
chance for success they had. The lines, with the new ugly twist that had
been imparted to them, might draw a half dozen rude guffaws from
different parts of the audience, but the chill disfavor with which they
were received by the rest of the house, must, she felt, have been
apparent to everybody. There seemed, though, to be a superstition that a
laugh was a sacred thing; something to be fed carefully with more of the
same thing that had originally produced it. This treatment was persisted
in, despite the fact that the audiences shrank and shriveled and the
box-office receipts, she gathered from the gossip of the company, hung
just about at the minimum required to keep them going.

What troubled her was her own apathetic acceptance of it all. Just as
her ear seemed to have grown dull to the offenses that nightly were
committed against it on the stage, and to the leering response, which
was all they ever got from across the footlights, so her spirit
submitted tamely to the prospect of failure. She hardly seemed to
herself the same