She never made any excuses; just took her place with a nod of acquiescence.  But she often felt like doing as some of the rest of them did; felt it would be a perfectly enormous relief to shriek out incoherent words of abuse, burst into tears and sobs, and rush from the stage.  Her position—­her new position, she fancied, would entitle her to do that—­once.  And then the notion that she was saving up that luxurious possibility for some time when it would do the most good, would bring back her old smile.  And Galbraith, lost in wonder at her already, would wonder anew.

They followed the traditions of the Globe in giving The Girl Up-stairs its try-out in Milwaukee—­four performances; from a Thursday to a Saturday night, with rehearsals pretty much all the time in between.

About all that this hegira meant to Rose was that she got two solid hours’ sleep on the train going up on Thursday afternoon and another two hours on the train coming back on Sunday morning.  She had domesticated herself automatically, in the little hotel across from the theater, and she had gone right on working just as she did at the Globe.  Oddly enough, she didn’t differentiate much between rehearsals and the performances.  Perhaps because she was so absorbed with her labors off the stage; perhaps because the thoroughly tentative nature of everything they did was so strongly impressed on her.

The piece was rewritten more or less after every performance.  They didn’t get the curtain down on the first one until five minutes after twelve—­for even an experienced director like Galbraith can make a mistake in timing—­and the mathematically demonstrated necessity for cutting, or speeding, a whole hour out of the piece, tamed even the wild-eyed Mr. Mills.  The principals, after having for weeks been routined in the reading of their lines and the execution of their business, were given new speeches to say and new things to do at a moment’s notice—­literally, sometimes, while the performance was going on.  Ghastly things happened, of course.  A tricky similarity of cues would betray somebody into a speech three scenes ahead; a cut would have the unforeseen effect of leaving somebody stranded, half-changed, in his dressing-room when his entrance cue came round; an actor would dry up, utterly forget his lines in the middle of a scene he could have repeated in his sleep—­and the amazing way in which these disasters were retrieved, the way these people who hadn’t, so far, impressed Rose very strongly with their collective intelligence, extemporized, righted the capsizing boat, kept the scene going—­somehow—­no matter what happened, gave her a new respect for their claims to a real profession.

This was the great thing they had, she concluded; the quality of coming up to the scratch, of giving whatever it took out of themselves to meet the need of the moment.  They weren’t—­her use of this phrase harked back to the days of the half-back—­yellow.  If you’d walked through the train that took them back to Chicago Sunday morning, had seen them, glum, dispirited, utterly fagged out, unsustained by a single gleam of hope, you’d have said it was impossible that they should give any sort of performance that night—­let alone a good one.  But by eight o’clock that night, when the overture was called, you wouldn’t have known them for the same people.