It was a life, of course, that abounded in what pass for hardships.  There is no desolation to surpass that of the second-best hotel (rates two dollars a day), in a small middle western city, except the same kind of hotel in the same sort of city in the South.  Bad air, bad beds and bad food are their staples and what passes for service seems especially calculated to encourage the victim to dispense with it as far as possible.  The stages and dressing-rooms in the theaters were almost always dirty and were frequently overrun with rats.  It was always cold and drafty back there, except when it happened to be suffocating.  Also, the day’s work by no means invariably concluded with even a half a bed in a two-dollar-a-day hotel.  If there happened to be a train coming along at two o’clock in the morning, and also happened to be a chance to play a matinee in the town you were jumping to, you took your suit-case to the theater, lugged it from there after the performance, to the station, and spent an indefinite number of hours thereafter, in an air-tight waiting-room.  Waiting, be it observed, for a chance to curl up in a seat in the day-coach, when the train came along.

But Rose didn’t mind this very much.  The rooms assigned to her and her roommate were fully as comfortable as the one she had lived in on Clark Street, and the meals, as a whole, were rather better than those her habitual lunch-room had provided.  As for riding on the train:  it gave you the sense of doing something and getting somewhere, without imposing the necessity either for judgment or for resolution.  The real discomforts to Rose were not the material ones.

The piece had been, as she discovered during the one rehearsal she had attended in Chicago, deliberately cheapened and vulgarized for the road.  The only one of the principals who had a shred of professional reputation, was a comedian named Max Webber, who played the part of the cosmetic king.  He’d come up in vaudeville and his methods reeked of it.  He was featured in the billing and he arrogated all the privileges of a real star.  He was intensely and destructively jealous of any approbation he didn’t himself arouse, even if it was manifested when he was not on the stage.  He distended his part out of all reasonable semblance, and to the practical annihilation of the plot, by the injection into it of musty vaudeville specialties of his, which he assured the weak-kneed management were knock-outs.  And his clowning and mugging made it impossible to play a legitimate scene with him, with any shadow of professional self-respect.

The result of this was that the girl who had rehearsed Patricia Devereux’s part, an ambitious, well-equipped young woman who would have added much-needed strength to the cast, delivered an ultimatum during the last rehearsal but one, and on having her very reasonable demands rejected, walked out.  Olga Larson, who had understudied Patricia ever since the Chicago opening, was given the part.  The rest of the principals were either pathetic failures with lamentable stories of better days, or promising youngsters, like Olga herself, with no adequate training.