The Larson girl gave a decisive little nod.  Not so much, it seemed, in assent to what Rose had just said, but as if some question in her own mind had been answered.

“You’ll get used to that feeling,” she said.  “You’ve got to take a chance anyway, so why worry?  We can work our heads off, but if the piece is a fliv the opening night, they’ll tack up the notice, and there we’ll be with two weeks’ pay for eight weeks’ work, and another six weeks’ work for nothing in something else if we’re lucky enough to get it.”

This was a possibility Rose hadn’t thought of.  “But—­that isn’t fair!” she said.

The other girl laughed grimly.  “Fair!” she echoed.  “What they want to print that word in the dictionary for, I don’t see.  Because what it means don’t exist.  Not where I live, anyway.  But what’s the good of making a fuss about it?  We’ve got to take our chance like everybody else.”

“I don’t believe this piece will fall, though,” said Rose.  “I don’t think Mr. Galbraith would let it.  I think he’s a perfect wonder, don’t you?”

The Larson girl looked at her again.  “He’s supposed to be about the best in the business,” she said, “and I guess he is.”  She added, “Dave tells me he’s going to put you with us in the sextette.”

Dave was the thick pianist, and Rose had found him in the highest degree obnoxious.  He seemed to occupy an indeterminate social position in their ship’s company, between the forecastle, which was the chorus, and the quarter-deck, which comprised Galbraith (you might call him the pilot), the baby-faced man with the tortoise-shell spectacles, reputed to be the author, two awesome intermittent gentlemen identified in the dressing-room as the owners of the piece, and the musical director, together with one or two more as yet unclassified.  The principals, when they should appear, would, Rose assumed, belong on the quarter-deck too.  The social gap between this afterguard and Rose and her colleagues in the chorus, was not so very wide, but it was abysmally deep.  Nevertheless, the pianist, buoyed up on the wings of a boundless effrontery, seemed to manage to remain unaware of it.

He had started rehearsals with this piece, it appeared, as a chorus-man, and had become a pianist, thanks to the interposition of Fate (the real pianist had fallen suddenly and desperately ill), and to his own irresistible assurance that he could do anything.  He could keep time and he hit perhaps a third of the notes right.

The chorus liked him.  The girls all called him Dave, seemed to appreciate his notion of humor, and accepted his hugs and pawings as a matter of course.  But he took his jokes, his familiarities, and his apparently impregnable self-esteem, upon the quarter-deck—­slapped the author on the back now and then, and had even been known to address John Galbraith as “Old man.”  Incidentally, he hung about within ear-shot during conferences of the powers, freely offered his advice, and brought all sorts of interesting tidbits of gossip and prophecy back to the chorus.