She formed her likes and dislikes with a complete disregard of the social or professional importance of the objects of them.  She took an immediate liking to Rose; gave her some valuable hints on dancing, took to calling her “dearie” before the end of the second rehearsal and, with her arm around her, confided to her in terms of blood-curdling profanity, her opinion of Stewart Lester, the tenor, who played the part of Dick Benham in the piece.

The queer thing was that she and Patricia were on the best of terms.  They didn’t compete, that was it, Rose supposed, and they were both good enough cosmopolites to bridge across the antipodal distances between their respective traditions and environments.  Patricia hated the tenor as bitterly as Anabel.  And, in her own way, she was as pleasantly friendly to Rose.  There were no endearments or caresses, naturally, but her brusk nods of greeting and farewell seemed to have real good feeling behind them.

The men principals—­this was rather a surprise to Rose—­weren’t nearly so pleasant nor so friendly.  Most of them professed to be totally unaware of her existence and the one or two who showed an awareness—­Freddy France, who played the comic detective, was chief of these offenders—­did it in a way that brought the fighting blood into her cheeks.

My astronomical figure for the expression of Rose’s rise in her profession is, in one important particular, misleading.  There was nothing precalculable about it, as there is about the solemn swing of the stars.  The impetus and direction of Rose’s career derived from two incidents that might just as well not have happened—­two of the flukiest of small chances.

The first of these chances concerned itself with Olga Larson and her bad voice.  Olga, as I think I have told you, was one of the sextette.  And, oddly enough, she owed her membership in this little group of quasi principals, to her voice and nothing else.  Because it was a bad voice only when she talked.  When she sang, it had a gorgeous thrilling ring to it that made Patricia Devereux, when she heard it, clench her hands and narrow her eyes.  She’d never been taught what to do with it, but then, for what Galbraith wanted of her she needed no teaching.  Her ear was infallible; let her hear a tune once and she could reproduce it accurately, squarely up to time, squarely, always, in the middle of the pitch.  When she opened her rather dainty-looking mouth and sang, she could give you across the footlights the impression that at least four first-class sopranos were going uncommon strong.  She hadn’t a salient or commonplace enough sort of beauty to have singled her out from the chorus and she was no better a dancer than passable.  But none of the girls who would be picked out by a committee of automobile salesmen as the prettiest and the best dancers in the chorus could sing a note, and the sextette would have been dumb without her voice.

It was natural enough that Patricia didn’t like it.  She owed her own position as a leading light-opera soprano to the cultivation to its highest possible perfection of a distinctly second-rate voice, to a precise knowledge of its limitations and to a most scrupulous economy in its effects.  Inevitably, then, the raw splendors that Olga Larson dispensed so prodigally gave Patricia the creeps.