The first ten days of her life on the road had, on the whole, a distinctly restorative effect.  I have never heard of a physician’s recommending a course of one-night stands as a rest cure to nervously exhausted patients, but I am inclined to think the idea has its merits, for all that.  Certainly the regime was, for a while, beneficial to Rose.  The merit of it was that it offered some sort of occupation for practically all her time.

A typical day consisted in getting up in the morning at an hour determined for you either by the call posted on the bulletin board in the theater the night before, telling you what time you were to be at the railway station, or by the last moment at which you could get into the dining-room in the hotel.  You ate all you could manage at breakfast, because lunch was likely to consist of a sandwich and an orange bought from the train butcher; with perhaps the lucky addition of a cup of coffee at some junction point where you changed trains.  You lugged your suit-case down to the station, and had your arrival there noted by the manager, who, of course, bought all the tickets for the company.  You needn’t even bother to know where you were going, except out of idle curiosity.  The train came along and you got a seat by yourself on the shady side, if you could; though the men being more agile, generally got there first.

The convention of giving precedence to the ladies, Rose promptly discovered, and with a sort of satisfaction, did not apply.  Indeed, all the automatic small courtesies and services which, in any life she’d known, men had been expected to show to women, were here completely barred.  A girl could let a man come up to her on a platform where they were all gathered waiting for the train, and casually slide an arm around her, without any one’s paying the slightest attention to the act.  But if, when the train came along, she permitted him to pick up her suit-case, carry it into the train and find a seat for her, there would be nods and glances.

Well, you got into the train and dozed and read a magazine (or both) and by and by, when everybody else did, you got up and got out.  Perhaps you waited on a triangular railway platform for another train, or perhaps you trailed along in a procession, to a hotel.  In the latter case, you got a meal and found out where the opera-house was.

There were various minor occupations that you slipped into the interstices of a day like this whenever they happened to come.  You combed out and brushed your hair (a hundred strokes) which you were too tired to do at night after the performance and seldom waked up in time for in the morning.  And, if you were wise, as Rose was, thanks to a tip from Anabel, and had emancipated yourself from the horror of overnight laundries by providing yourself with crepe underclothes and dark little silk blouses, you got all the hot water you could beg of the chambermaid, and did the family wash in the bowl in your room, on an afternoon when you had a short jump and there was no matinee.