e's no place," he said, "in this store, or I trust in the town
either, for young women of your sort. Good day!"

Rose made five more applications for work on Main Street, all with the
same result. Some of those who refused her were panicky about it; one
threatened to have her put in jail. One looked knowing and after he had
expressed in jocular though emphatic terms, his sense of her
impossibility as a publicly acknowledged employee, intimated a desire to
prosecute a personal acquaintance with her further.

She had left the first store incredulous rather than angry, under the
impression that she had encountered a chance fanatic. It seemed
impossible that anybody with a well-balanced mind, could treat her as if
she carried contamination, merely because she had earned a living for a
while in the chorus of a musical comedy. It was fortunate for her that
her first applications were met by anger, rude discourtesy, and openly
avowed suspicion, because this treatment roused in her, for the first
time in months, a strong surge of indignation. Her blood came up after
these encounters, nearer and nearer the boiling point. The man who
smiled at her like a satyr, was shriveled by the blaze of her blue eyes,
and was left, red-faced, blustering weakly after her.

When she walked back to the hotel along Main Street the lassitude that
had so long held her half-paralyzed was gone. She was the old Rose
again; the Rose whom Galbraith would have recognized.

She didn't know it. She was conscious of nothing but a hot determination
that had not, as yet, even expressed itself in terms. It was just a
newly kindled fire that warmed her shivering spirit; that made her
fearless; in a quite unreasoning way, confident.

The only touch of self-conscious thought about her was a vague wonder at
her long submission. What had she been doing all that while, drifting
like that, letting herself be beaten like that, consenting to live amid
the shabby degradations of the life that had surrounded her ever since
the company had gone on the road? The sense of the unreality of those
past weeks grew stronger. She felt like a person just waking out of a
long troubled dream.

She mode her way among the loungers in the lobby of the hotel, not
unmindful of their stares, but magnificently impervious to them; came up
to the desk and told the clerk she wanted to see the proprietor.

"Nothing doing," said the clerk.

Then as he got the straight look of her eyes,