et, tried to correct her pallor with a
little too much rouge, and with the glaring falsehood that it was
clearing up, put on the pathetic little fifteen-dollar suit that she
religiously guarded for occasions.

She was very fidgety, a little bit furtive, and elaborately over-casual
about all this; a fact to which Rose was, also a little artificially,
oblivious.

Their partnership had not proved, from Dolly's point of view, at any
rate, an unqualified success. They'd not been on the road three days
before she'd begun to wonder whether she hadn't been hasty in the
selection of her chum. Doris Dane was a very magnificent person, of
course. She made the rest of the company, including the principals, look
(this was a phrase Dolly had unguardedly used the day Rose first
appeared at rehearsal) like a bunch of rummies. And of course it was an
immense compliment to be singled out by an awe-inspiring person like
that, for her particular chum. Only, once the compliment had been paid,
its value as an abiding possession became a little doubtful. Awe is not
a very comfortable sort of emotion to eat breakfast with.

Evidently the rest of the company felt that way about it, for Dane was
not popular. She gave no handle for an active grievance, to be sure. She
wasn't superior in the sense in which Dolly used the word. She didn't
look haughty nor say withering things to people, nor tell
passionately-believed stories designed to convince her hearers that her
rightful place in the world was immensely higher than the one she now
occupied. One didn't hear her exclaiming under some bit of managerial
tyranny, that never, in the course of her whole life, had she been
subjected to such an affront. But she had a blank, rather tired way of
keeping silence when other people told stories like that, or made
protests like that, which was subtly infuriating. The very fact that she
never tried to impress the company, was presumptive evidence that the
company didn't very greatly impress her. If their common feeling about
her had ever crystallized into a phrase, its effect would have been,
that all their affairs, personal and professional, past, present and to
come, even those she shared with them, were not of sufficient importance
to her ever to get quite the whole of her attention. It was a notion
that irritated the women and frightened off the men. Probably nothing
else could have kept a young woman of Rose's physical attractions from
being, on a tour