The wonderful thing about it was that she carried that eagerness beyond the confines of her own job.  And she put it to good effect too.  She had taken that Larson girl and, by the plain force of personal dominance, made her talk right.  Well, why?  That was the question.  Who was she anyway?  Where had she come from?  Who was “the only person who really mattered” to her—­the person who wasn’t a pussy-cat?

He had tried hard to convince himself that these were all professional questions.  It was true they had a bearing on the more important and perfectly legitimate question whether he had, in this altogether extraordinary personality, discovered a new star.  He had, during the last quarter century, discovered a number—­one or two of them authentically of the first magnitude.

It would have simplified matters immensely if he could have seen Rose in this category.  But the stubborn fact was, he couldn’t.  She couldn’t sing a bit, and marked as her natural talent was for dancing, she hadn’t begun young enough ever to master the technique of it.  That left acting; but he doubted if she could ever go very far at that.  Salient as her personality was, she hadn’t the instinct for putting it over.  Or, if she had it, she distrusted it.  She was handicapped, too, by her sense of humor.  A real star in the egg, wouldn’t have stopped in the middle of that first fine blaze of wrath he’d seen, to join him in smiling at it.  A real actress wouldn’t have spent her energies teaching another woman to talk, nor persuading him to buy another woman a beautiful frock.  The focus had to be sharper than that.  The only way you got the drive it took to spell your name in electric lights, was by subordinating everything else to the projection of yourself, treating your surroundings, with irresistible conviction, merely as a background.  This girl could never do that.

Yet the notion wouldn’t leave his mind that she could do something, and do it more than commonly well.  She must have an instinct of her own for effects to enable her to understand so instantaneously what he was trying to do.  And once in a while, especially lately, he’d seen, over some experiment of his, a flash of dissent across her eager face which gave him the preposterous idea that by asking her—­asking a chorus-girl!—­he might get a suggestion worth thinking about.

Certainly she had helped him in another way, there was no doubt of that.  That sextette, thanks to her teaching, would be the smartest, best mannered bunch of chorus-girls that had adorned a production of his in a long, long time.

And here, perhaps, he came closer than anywhere else to an understanding of the source of the girl’s attraction for him.  John Galbraith could remember the time when, a nameless little rat of a cockney, he had slept under London bridges, opened cab doors for half-pence, carried links on foggy nights.  By the clear force of genius he had made his way up from that;—­from throwing cart-wheels for the amusement of the queues waiting at the pit entrances of theaters, from the ribald knock-about of East End halls, from the hilarity of Drury Lane pantomimes.  Professionally his success was a solid indubitable thing.  If he weren’t actually preeminent in his special field, at least there was no one who was accorded a preeminence over him.