It was in the dressing-room one night, after one of these rehearsals, that she caught a different view of the situation.  She sat down on a bench to unlace her shoes and looked straight into Olga Larson’s face—­a face sunken with a despair that turned Rose cold all over.  The tearless tragic eyes were staring, without recognition, straight into Rose’s own.  It must be with faces like this that people mounted the rails on the high bridge in Lincoln Park, intent on leaving a world that had become intolerable.  Packed in all around her in the inadequate dressing-room, the other girls were chattering, squealing, scrambling into their clothes, as unaware of her tense motionless figure, as if it had been a mere inanimate lump.  She couldn’t have been more alone if she had been sitting out on the rock of Juan Fernandez.

Rose invented various pretexts to delay her own dressing until the other girls were gone.  She could no more have abandoned that hopeless creature there, than she could have left a person drowning.  When they had the room to themselves, she sat down on the bench beside her.

“You’re all right,” she said, feeling rather embarrassed and inadequate and not knowing just how to begin.  “I’m going to help you.”

“It’s always like this,” the girl said.  “It’s no use.  He’ll put me back in the chorus again.”

“Not if I can help it,” Rose said.  “But the first thing to do is to put on your clothes.  Then we’ll go out and get something to eat.”

Even that little beginning involved a struggle—­a conscious exertion of all the power Rose possessed.  She learned, for the first time, what the weight of an immense melancholy inertia like that can be.  The girl was like one paralyzed.  She was willing enough to talk.  She told Rose the whole story of her life; not as one making confidences to a friend; rather with the curious detachment of a melancholy spectator discussing an unfortunate life she had no concern with.

She knew how good her voice was, and, equally, how badly it needed training.  She’d had, always, a passionate desire to sing and a belief in her possibilities.  If she could get a chance, she could succeed.  She’d undergone heartbreaking privations, trying to save money enough out of her earnings at one form of toil after another, to take lessons.  But, repeatedly, these small savings had, by some disaster, been swept away:  stolen once, by a worthless older brother; absorbed on another occasion by her mother’s fatal illness.  Two years ago she had drifted into the chorus, but had been altogether unlucky in her various ventures.  She wasn’t naturally graceful—­had been slow learning to dance.  Again and again, she’d been dropped at the end of three or four weeks of rehearsal (gratuitous of course) and seen another girl put in her place.  When this hadn’t happened, the shows she had been in had failed after a few weeks’ life.