They entertained her vastly, now that a confidence in her ability to do her own part left her leisure to look around a bit.  The contrast between the two leading women, Patricia Devereux, who played the title part, and little Anabel Astor, who played the mercenary seductress, was a piquant source of speculation.  As far as speech and manners went, Miss Devereux might have been a born citizen of the world Rose had been naturalized into by her marriage with Rodney; in fact, she reminded her rather strikingly of Harriet.  She was cool, brusk, hard finished, and, as was evident from Galbraith’s manifest satisfaction with her, thoroughly workmanly and competent.  Yet she never seemed really to work in rehearsal.  She gave no more than a bare outline of what she was going to do.  But the outline, in all its salient angles, was perfectly indicated.  She rehearsed in her ordinary street clothes, with her hat on, and as often as not, with a wrist-bag in one hand.  She neither danced, sang, nor acted.  But she had her part letter perfect before any of the other principals.  She never missed a cue, and though she sang off the top of her voice, and let the confines of a very scant little tailor skirt mark the limits of her dancing, she sang her songs in perfect tempo and always made it completely clear to Galbraith and the musical director, just how much of the stage in every direction, her dances were going to occupy and precisely the tempi at which they were to be executed.  In a word, if her work had no more emotional value than a mechanical drawing, it did have the precision of one.

Rose mightn’t have appreciated tins, had she not seen and admired Miss Devereux from the front in a production she and Rodney had been two or three times to see the season before.

Little Anabel Astor presented as striking a contrast to all this as it would be possible to imagine.  She, too, had attained a good deal of celebrity in the musical-comedy world—­was to be one of the features of the cast.  She’d come up from the ranks of the chorus.  She’d been one of the ponies, years ago, in some of George M. Cohan’s productions, and she was still just a chorus-girl.  But a chorus-girl raised to the third, or fourth, or, if you like, the nth power.  She had an electric grin, and a perfectly boundless vitality, which she spent as freely on rehearsals as on performances.  She always dressed for rehearsals just as the chorus did, in a middy-blouse and bloomers, and she worked as hard as they did, and even more ungrudgingly.

She was a pretty little thing, with nothing very feminine about her—­even her voice had a harsh boyish quality—­and she never looked prettier to Rose than when, her face flushed with an hour’s honest toil, she would wipe the copious sweat of it off with her sleeve, and panting, look up with a smile at John Galbraith and an expectant expression, waiting for his next command, which reminded Rose of the look of a terrier alert for the stick his master means to throw for him.  Her speech was unaffectedly that of a Milwaukee Avenue gamin, and it served adequately and admirably as a vehicle for the expression of her emotions and ideas.