on, and she was sitting up all night in a day-coach because
that seemed such an easy way to save money. At her age discomfort was a
small matter, when one made five dollars a day by it. She had
confidently expected to sleep after the car got quiet, but in the two
chairs behind her were a sick girl and her mother, and the girl had been
coughing steadily since ten o'clock. They had come from somewhere in
Pennsylvania, and this was their second night on the road. The mother
said they were going to Colorado "for her daughter's lungs." The
daughter was a little older than Thea, perhaps nineteen, with patient
dark eyes and curly brown hair. She was pretty in spite of being so
sooty and travel-stained. She had put on an ugly figured satine kimono
over her loosened clothes. Thea, when she boarded the train in Chicago,
happened to stop and plant her heavy telescope on this seat. She had not
intended to remain there, but the sick girl had looked up at her with an
eager smile and said, "Do sit there, miss. I'd so much rather not have a
gentleman in front of me."

After the girl began to cough there were no empty seats left, and if
there had been Thea could scarcely have changed without hurting her
feelings. The mother turned on her side and went to sleep; she was used
to the cough. But the girl lay wide awake, her eyes fixed on the roof of
the car, as Thea's were. The two girls must have seen very different
things there.

Thea fell to going over her winter in Chicago. It was only under unusual
or uncomfortable conditions like these that she could keep her mind
fixed upon herself or her own affairs for any length of time. The rapid
motion and the vibration of the wheels under her seemed to give her
thoughts rapidity and clearness. She had taken twenty very expensive
lessons from Madison Bowers, but she did not yet know what he thought of
her or of her ability. He was different from any man with whom she had
ever had to do. With her other teachers she had felt a personal
relation; but with him she did not. Bowers was a cold, bitter,
avaricious man, but he knew a great deal about voices. He worked with a
voice as if he were in a laboratory, conducting a series of experiments.
He was conscientious and industrious, even capable of a certain cold
fury when he was working with an interesting voice, but Harsanyi
declared that he had the soul of a shrimp, and could no more make an
artist than a throat specialist could. Thea realized that