od the whole thing. It was evidently a fact that
despite the plain little suit, the beaver hat, the rough ulster she was
wearing, she didn't look like the sort of girl who had to rely on
getting a job in the chorus for keeping a roof over her head. Looks,
speech, manner--everything segregated her from the type. It was all
obvious enough, only Rose hadn't happened to think of it. It accounted,
of course, for the rather odd way in which the landlady, the
ticket-seller at the Globe, and meek little Mr. Quan, the assistant
stage manager, all had looked at her, as at some one they couldn't
classify. John Galbraith, out of a wider experience of life, had
classified her, or thought he had, as a well-bred young girl who, in a
moment of pique, or mischief, had decided it would be fun to go on the
stage. The test he had applied wasn't, from that point of view,
unnecessarily cruel. The girl he had taken her for, would, on being
ordered to repeat that grotesque bit of vulgarity of his, have drawn her
dignity about her like a cloak, and gone back in a chastened spirit to
the world where she belonged.

A gorgeous apparition came sweeping by them just now, on a line from the
dressing-room to the door--a figure that, with regal deliberation, was
closing a blue broadcloth coat, trimmed with sable, over an authentic
Callot frock. The Georgette hat on top of it was one that Rose had last
seen in a Michigan Avenue shop. She had amused herself by trying to
vizualize the sort of person who ought to buy it. It had found its
proper buyer at last--fulfilled its destiny.

"Oh, Grant!" said John Galbraith.

The queenly creature stopped short and Rose recognized her with a jump,
as the sulky chorus-girl. Dressed like this, her twenty pounds of
surplus fat didn't show.

Galbraith walked over to her. "I shan't need you any more, Grant." He
spoke in a quiet impersonal sort of way, but his voice had, as always, a
good deal of carrying power. "It's hardly worth your while trying to
work, I suppose, when you're so prosperous as this. And it isn't worth
my while to have you soldiering. You needn't report again."

He nodded not unamiably, and turned away. Evidently she had ceased to
exist for him as completely as the duchess. She glared after him and
called out in a hoarse throaty voice, "Thank Gawd I don't _have_ to work
for you."

He'd come back to Rose again by this time, and she saw him smile. "When
you do it," he said over his shoulder, "thank