So when Grant came back and ate her humble pie in vain, and later, when Benedict was relegated to a place in the back line, the natural explanation was that Galbraith was crazy about the new girl.

Of course it set Rose all ablaze with wrath when she became aware of this.  It was precisely because she had rebelled against the theory that love was what made the world go round, that she was here in the chorus.  Had she been content to let it make her world go round, she never would have left Rodney.  The only way she had of refuting the assumption in this case would be by making good so demonstrably and instantaneously, that they’d be compelled to see that her promotion had been inevitable.

It was in this spirit, with blazing cheeks and eyes, that she attacked the next morning’s rehearsal.  She was only dimly aware of Benedict out in the hall in front, viperishly waiting for the arrival of one of the owners to make an impassioned plea for reinstatement.  Her tears or her tantrums were matters of supremely little importance.  But that John Galbraith should see that he had promoted her on merit and on nothing but merit, mattered enormously.

Lacking the clue, he watched her in a sort of amused perplexity.  Her way of snatching his instructions, her almost viciously determined manner of carrying them out, would have been natural had she been working under the spur of some stinging rebuke, instead of under the impetus of an unexpected promotion.

“Don’t make such hard work of it, Dane,” he said at last.  “You’re all right, but have a little fun out of it.  There are eight hundred people out there,” he waved his arm out toward the empty hall, “who have paid their hard-earned money to feel jolly and have a good time.  If you go on looking like that, they’ll think this piece was produced by Simon Legree.”

There came the same gleaming twinkle in his eye that had disarmed her resentment once before, and as before, she found herself feeling rather absurd.  What mattered the microcephalic imaginings of greasy Dave and his friends among the chorus?  John Galbraith wasn’t the sort of man to get infatuated with a chorus-girl.  The gleam in his eye was enough, all by itself, to make that plain.

So, flushing up a little, she grinned back at him, gave him a nod of acquiescence, and fell back to her place for the beginning of the next evolution.

“If she smiles like that,” thought John Galbraith, “she’ll break up the show.”  At the end of the rehearsal, he said to her, “You’re doing very well indeed, Dane.  If I could have caught you ten years ago, I could have made a dancer out of you.”

It was a very real, unqualified compliment, and as such Rose understood it.  Because, by a dancer, he meant something very different from a prancing chorus-girl.  The others giggled and exchanged glances with Dave at the piano.  They didn’t understand.  To them, the compliment seemed to have been delivered with the left hand.  And somehow, an amused recognition of the fact that they didn’t understand, as well as of the fact that she did, flashed across from John Galbraith’s eyes to hers.