“Just a minute,” he said as they all started to leave the stage, and they came back and gathered in a half-circle around him.  “We’ll rehearse the first act to-night with the principals.  You six girls are supposed to be young millionairesses, very up-to-date-bachelor-girl type, intimate friends of the leading lady, who is a multi-millionairess that’s run away from home.  You’ve all got a few lines to say.  Go to Mr. Quan and get your parts and have them up by to-night.”

At half past four that afternoon, when the regular chorus rehearsal was over, Rose asked John Galbraith if she might speak to him for a minute.  He had one foot on a chair and was in the act of unlacing his dancing shoes, so he seemed to be, for him, comparatively permanent.  He had a disconcerting way, she had noticed, of walking away on some business of his own in the middle of other people’s sentences, intending to come back, no doubt, in time to hear the end of them, but forgetting to.

“Fire away,” he said, looking around at her over his shoulder.  Then, with reference to the blue-bound pair of sides she held in her hand, “What’s the matter?  Isn’t the part fat enough for you?”

“Fat enough?” Rose echoed inquiringly.  “Oh, you mean long enough.”  She smiled in good-humored acknowledgment of his joke, and let that do for an answer.

John Galbraith hadn’t been sure that it would be a joke to Rose.  He’d been a musical-comedy producer so long that no megalomaniacal absurdity could take him by surprise.  There were chorus-girls no doubt in this very company, who, on being promoted to microscopic parts, would be capable of complaining because they weren’t bigger.

“All the same,” said Rose, “I’m afraid I’ve got to tell you that I can’t take this, and to ask you to put me back into the regular chorus.”

He wasn’t immune to surprise after all, it seemed.  He straightened up in a flash and stared at her.  “What on earth are you talking about?” he asked.

“If I have words to say, even only a few, wouldn’t anybody who happened to be in the audience, know who I was?—­I mean if they knew me already.”

“Of course they would.  What of it?”

“I told you,” said Rose, “the day you gave me a job, that it wasn’t a lark.  I had to begin earning my own living suddenly, and without any training for it at all, and this seemed to be the best way.  That’s—­all true, and it’s true that no one could come and, as you say, lead me away by the ear.  Nobody’s responsible for me but myself.  But there are people who’d be terribly shocked and hurt if they found out I’d gone on the stage.  They know I’m earning my own living, but they don’t know how I’m doing it.  I thought that as just one of the chorus, made up and all, I’d be safe.  But with these lines to say ...”