“What are your changes, Dane?” Galbraith asked.

Queerly enough, the curt seriousness of his speech was immensely grateful to her—­suggested that she perhaps hadn’t been, wholly anyhow, the object of his derision before.

“I only thought,” said Rose, “that if instead of saying, ’My gracious, Sylvia!’ I said, ‘Sylvia, dear!’ or something like that, it would sound a little more natural.  And if I said, ‘I do wish, Sylvia’ instead of, ‘I wish to goodness, Sylvia ...’”

She had said it all straight to the author.

“I suppose,” he said, sneering very hard, “that your own personal knowledge of the way society women talk is what leads you to believe that your phrases are better than mine?”

“Yes,” said Rose, serenely matter-of-fact, “it is.”

Sarcasm is an uncertain sort of pop-gun.  You never can tell from which end it’s going to go off.

“I don’t know,” said Miss Devereux, turning now a deadly smile on him, “whether Miss—­what’s-her-name—­agrees with me or not.  But, do you know, I agree with her.”

“Oh, I don’t care a damn!” said Mr. Harold Mills.  “Go as far as you like.  I don’t recognize the piece now.  What it’ll be when you—­butchers get through with it ...!” He flung out his hands and stalked away.

“Go find Mr. Quan,” said Galbraith to Rose, “and tell him to mark those changes of yours in the book.  Tell him I said so.”

It was, though, a pretty unsatisfactory victory.  Everybody was grinning; for the tale spread fast, and while Rose knew it wasn’t primarily at her, her sensations were those of a perfectly serious, well-meaning child, in adult company, who, in all innocence has just made a remark which, for some reason incomprehensible to him, has convulsed one member of it with fury, and the others with laughter.  More or less she could imagine where the joke lay.  Harold had evidently been quarreling with pretty much all of the principals, over more or less necessary changes in his precious text, until everybody was rather on edge about it, loaded and primed for all sorts of explosions; when, cheerfully along came Rose, a perfectly green young chorus-girl, unsuspectingly carrying the match for the mine, or the straw for the camel, whichever way you wanted to put it.

She wouldn’t have minded the way she had blundered into the focus of public attention, if, in other particulars, the rehearsal had been going well with her.  Unluckily, though, she started off wrong foot foremost in the very first of their numbers, with a mistake that snarled up everything and brought down an explosion of wrath from Galbraith.  Even if she’d been trying, he groaned, to make mistakes, he didn’t see how she’d managed that one.  But the real nightmare didn’t begin till the first of her scenes with Sylvia, where she had to talk.