uence, that baby of hers was going
to be intelligent!

CHAPTER XI

AN ILLUSTRATION

So far as externals went, her life, that spring, was immensely
simplified. The social demands on her, which had been so insistent all
winter, stopped almost automatically. The only exception was the Junior
League show in Easter week, for which she put in quite a lot of work.
She was to have danced in it.

This is an annual entertainment by which Chicago sets great store. All
the smartest and best-looking of the younger set take part in it, in
costumes that would do credit to Mr. Ziegfeld, and as much of Chicago as
is willing and able to pay five dollars a seat for the privilege is
welcome to come and look. Delirious weeks are spent in rehearsal, under
a first-class professional director, audience and performers have an
equally good time, and Charity, as residuary legatee, profits by
thousands.

Rose dropped in at a rehearsal one day at the end of a solid two hours
of committee work, found it unexpectedly amusing, and made a point
thereafter of attending when she could. Her interest was heightened if
not wholly actuated by some things Jimmy Wallace had been telling her
lately about how such things were done on the real stage.

He had written a musical comedy once, lived through the production of
it, and had spent a hard-earned two-weeks vacation trouping with it on
the road, so he could speak with authority. It was a wonderful Odyssey
when you could get him to tell it, and as she made a good audience she
got the whole thing--what everybody was like, from the director down,
how the principals dug themselves in and fought to the last trench for
every line and bit of business in their parts, and sapped and mined
ahead to get, here or there, a bit more;--how insanely hard the chorus
worked....

The thing got a sociological twist eventually, of course, when Jane
wanted to know if it were true, as alleged by a prominent woman writer
on feminism, that the chorus-girls were driven to prostitution by
inadequate pay. Jimmy demolished this assertion with more warmth than he
often showed. He didn't know any other sort of job that paid a totally
untrained girl so well. There were initial requirements, of course. She
had to have reasonably presentable arms and legs and a rudimentary sense
of rhythm. But it took a really accomplished stenographer, for instance,
to earn as much a week as was paid the average chorus-girl. The trouble
was