be a brute about it. He began every
one of these tussles to improve her reading of a line, with a gentleness
that would have done credit to a kinder-gartener. But, after three
attempts, each more ominously gentle and deliberate than the last, his
temper would suddenly fly all to pieces. "--No--no--no!" he would roar
at her, and the similes his exasperation would supply him with, for a
description of what her speech was like, were as numerous as the acids
in a chemical laboratory; and they all bit and burned just as hard.

Rose looked on with rather tepid feelings. She sympathized with
Galbraith on the whole. The poor man was doing his best; and the girl,
queerly, didn't seem to care. She confronted him in a sort of stockish
stupidity, saying her lines, when he told her to try again, with the
same frightful whang he was doing his best to correct, so that he was
justified, Rose felt, in accusing her of not trying, or even listening
to him.

It was in the dressing-room one night, after one of these rehearsals,
that she caught a different view of the situation. She sat down on a
bench to unlace her shoes and looked straight into Olga Larson's face--a
face sunken with a despair that turned Rose cold all over. The tearless
tragic eyes were staring, without recognition, straight into Rose's own.
It must be with faces like this that people mounted the rails on the
high bridge in Lincoln Park, intent on leaving a world that had become
intolerable. Packed in all around her in the inadequate dressing-room,
the other girls were chattering, squealing, scrambling into their
clothes, as unaware of her tense motionless figure, as if it had been a
mere inanimate lump. She couldn't have been more alone if she had been
sitting out on the rock of Juan Fernandez.

Rose invented various pretexts to delay her own dressing until the other
girls were gone. She could no more have abandoned that hopeless creature
there, than she could have left a person drowning. When they had the
room to themselves, she sat down on the bench beside her.

"You're all right," she said, feeling rather embarrassed and inadequate
and not knowing just how to begin. "I'm going to help you."

"It's always like this," the girl said. "It's no use. He'll put me back
in the chorus again."

"Not if I can help it," Rose said. "But the first thing to do is to put
on your clothes. Then we'll go out and get something to eat."

Even that little beginning involved a strugg