When Galbraith had put her into the sextette in The Girl Up-stairs, a hope, just about dead, had been awakened.  She’d at last learned to dance well enough to escape censure and she had seen for herself how indispensable her singing voice was to the group.  And then it had appeared she’d have to talk!  And, inexplicably to herself, her talking wasn’t right.  The thing had just been another mirage.  It was hopeless.  Galbraith would put her back into the chorus—­drop her, likely enough, altogether.

The thing that at first exasperated Rose and later, as she came vaguely to understand it, aroused both her pity and her determination, was the girl’s strange, dully fatalistic acquiescence in it all.  The sort of circumstances that in Rose herself set the blood drumming through her arteries, keyed her will to the very highest pitch, quickened her brain, made her feel in some inexplicable way, confident and irresistible, laid on this girl a paralyzing hand.  It wasn’t her fault that she didn’t meet her difficulties half-way with a vicious, driving offensive—­rout them, demoralize them.  It was her tragedy.

“All right,” Rose apostrophized them grimly.  “This time you’re up against me.”

“Look here!” she said to Olga, when the story was told (this was across the table in the dingy lunch-room where, as Doris Dane, she had had her first meal, and most of her subsequent ones), “look here, and listen to what I’m going to tell you.  I know what I’m talking about.  You’re going to learn to say your lines before to-morrow’s rehearsal, so that Mr. ...  So that Galbraith won’t stop you once.” (This was a trick of speech that came hard to Rose, but she was gradually learning it.) “We’re going up to my room now, and I’m going to teach you.  We’ve got lots of time.  Rehearsal to-morrow isn’t till twelve o’clock.  You’re going to stay in the sextette, and when the piece opens, you’re going to make a hit.”

She hesitated a moment, then added in the same blunt matter-of-fact way, “You’re one of the most beautiful women in Chicago.  Did you know that?  Dressed right and with your hair done right, you could make them stare.  Have you finished your coffee?  Then come along.  Here!  Give me your part.  You don’t want to lose it.”

For the girl, pitiably, almost ludicrously, was staring at Rose in a sort of somnambulistic daze.  She hadn’t been hypnotized, but she might about as well have been, for any real resistance her mind, or her will, could offer to her new friend’s vibrant confidence.

She went with Rose up to the little three-dollar room.  Rose put her into a chair, sat down opposite her, took the first phrase of her first speech, and said it very slowly, very quietly, half a dozen times.  That was at half past eleven o’clock at night.  By midnight, Olga could say those first three words, if not to Rose’s complete satisfaction, at least a lot better.  She went on and finished the sentence.