that the indispensable assets in the business were not character and
intelligence and ambition, but just personal charms.

Rose grinned across at Rodney. "That's like wives, isn't it?" she
observed.

"And then," Jimmy went on, "the work isn't really hard enough, except
during rehearsals, to keep them out of mischief." Rose smiled again, but
didn't press her analogy any further. "But a girl who's serious about
it, who doesn't have to be told the same thing more than once, and
catches on, sometimes, without being told at all,--why, she can always
have a job and she can be as independent as anybody. She can get
twenty-five dollars a week or even as high as thirty. It's surprising
though," he concluded, "considering what a bunch of morons most of them
are, that they work as well as they do; turn up on time for rehearsals
and performances, even when they're feeling really seedy, stand the
awful bawling out they get every few minutes--because some directors are
downright savages--and keep on going over and over a thing till they're
simply reeling on their pins, without any fuss at all."

"They can always lose their job," said Barry. "There's great merit in
that."

The latter part of this conversation was what she was to remember
afterward, but the thing which impressed Rose at the time, and that held
her for hours looking on at the League show rehearsals, was what Jimmy
had told her about the technical side of the work of production, the
labors of the director, and so on.

The League was paying their director three hundred dollars a week, and
by the end of the third rehearsal Rose decided that he earned it. The
change he could make, even with one afternoon's work, in the
effectiveness, the carrying power, of a dance number was astonishing. It
wasn't at all a question of good taste. There stood Bertie Willis simply
awash with good taste and oozing suggestions whose hopeless futility was
demonstrated, even to him, the moment an attempt was made to put them
into effect. The director was concerned with matters of fact. There were
ascertained methods of getting a certain range of effects and he knew
what they were and applied them--as well as the circumstances admitted.
He was working under difficulties, poor chap! Rose, enlightened by Jimmy
Wallace, could see that. A man habituated to bawling at a girl, when the
spirit so moved him, "Here, you Belmont! What do you think you're trying
to do? You try sleeping at night and sta