It wasn’t pretty, the dance step he executed—­a sort of stiff-legged skip accompanied by a vulgar hip wriggle and concluding with a straight-out sidewise kick.

A sick disgust clutched at Rose as she watched—­an utter revulsion from the whole loathly business.  She could scrub floors—­starve if she had to.  She couldn’t do the thing he demanded of her here out in the middle of the floor, in her street clothes, without the excuse of music to make it tolerable—­and before that row of leering faces.

“Well?” he asked, turning to her as he finished.  He wasn’t smiling at all.

“I’m not dressed to do that,” she said.

“I know you’re not,” he admitted coolly, “but it can be done.  Pick up your skirts and do it as you are,—­if you really want a job.”

There was just a faint edge of contempt in that last phrase and, mercifully, it roused her anger.  A blaze kindled in her blue eyes, and two spots of vivid color defined themselves in her cheeks.

She caught up her skirts as he had told her to do, executed without compromise the stiff-legged skip and the wriggle, and finished with a horizontal sidewise kick that matched his own.  Then, panting, trembling a little, she stood looking straight into his face.

The first thing she realized when the processes of thought began again was that even if there had been a hoax, she was not, in the event, the victim of it.  The attitude of her audience told her that.  Galbraith was staring at her with a look that expressed at first, clear astonishment, but gradually complicated itself with other emotions—­confusion, a glint of whimsical amusement.  That gleam, a perfectly honest, kindly one, decided Rose to take him on trust.  He wasn’t a brute, however it might suit his purposes to act like one.  And with an inkling of how her blaze of wrath must be amusing him, she smiled slowly and a little uncertainly, herself.

“We’ve been rehearsing this piece two weeks,” he said presently, looking away from her when he began to talk, “and I couldn’t take any one into the chorus now whom I’d have to teach the rudiments of dancing to.  I must have people who can do what I tell them.  That’s why a test was necessary.  Also, from now on, it would be a serious thing to lose anybody out of the chorus.  I couldn’t take anybody who had come down here—­for a lark.”

“It’s not a lark to me,” said Rose.

Now he looked around at her again.  “I know it isn’t,” he said.  “But I thought when you first came in here, that it was.”

With that, Rose understood 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