Inevitably, too, without any conscious malice about it, she made up her clear, hard little mind the moment she heard Olga talk, that she was utterly impossible for the sextette.  “Really, my dear man,” she told Galbraith after the first rehearsal, “you’ll have to find some one else.  American audiences will stand a good deal, I know, in the way of atrocious speech, but positively she’ll be hooted.  They’ll all sound frightful enough, especially because that Dane girl, if that’s her name, talks like a lady, but this one ...!” She gave a cruelly adequate little imitation of Olga’s delivery of one of her lines.  “Like some one who doesn’t know how, trying to play the slide trombone,” she commented.

Galbraith couldn’t pretend that she exaggerated the horrors of it, but explained why the girl was indispensable.  The explanation didn’t please Patricia any too well, either.

“Sing!” she cried hotly.  “But she sings detestably!”

“No doubt,” Galbraith admitted, “but she makes a great big noise always on the right note, and that’s what that bunch of penny whistlers can’t do without.  Give her a little time,” he concluded diplomatically, “and I’ll try to teach her.”

“It can’t be taught,” said Patricia.  “That’s too much even for you.”

So it happened that when Rose came out of her own nightmare, got her breath and found leisure to look around, she found some one else whose troubles weren’t so transitory.  The little scene in the first act, between Sylvia and the sextette, was held up again and again, endlessly, it seemed to Rose,—­and what must it have seemed to the poor victim?—­while Galbraith bellowed Larson’s lines after her, sometimes in grotesque imitation of her own inflections, sometimes in what was meant as a pattern for her to follow.  The girl whose ear was so wonderfully sensitive to pitch and rhythm, was simply deaf, it seemed, to the subtleties of inflection.  She reduced Galbraith to helpless wrath, in her panic, by mistaking now and again, his imitations for his models.  The chorus tittered; the spectators suffocated their guffaws as well as they could.  Patricia grew more and more acutely and infuriatingly ironic all the while.

Evidently Galbraith didn’t mean to be a brute about it.  He began every one of these tussles to improve her reading of a line, with a gentleness that would have done credit to a kinder-gartener.  But, after three attempts, each more ominously gentle and deliberate than the last, his temper would suddenly fly all to pieces. “—­No—­no—­no!” he would roar at her, and the similes his exasperation would supply him with, for a description of what her speech was like, were as numerous as the acids in a chemical laboratory; and they all bit and burned just as hard.

Rose looked on with rather tepid feelings.  She sympathized with Galbraith on the whole.  The poor man was doing his best; and the girl, queerly, didn’t seem to care.  She confronted him in a sort of stockish stupidity, saying her lines, when he told her to try again, with the same frightful whang he was doing his best to correct, so that he was justified, Rose felt, in accusing her of not trying, or even listening to him.