The chorus was similarly constituted.  There were fifteen girls in it, including the sextette, now a trio, part of them worn-out veterans (one of these was the duchess—­do you remember her?—­who had applied to Galbraith for a job the day that Rose got hers) and the others green young girls, not more than sixteen or seventeen, some of them, who had never been on the stage before.  It was one of these, a tiny, slim, black-haired little thing, who gave her name as Dolly Darling, but hadn’t memorized it yet herself, obviously a runaway in quest of romantic adventure, whom Rose adopted as a permanent roommate.

Her doing so opened up the breach between herself and Olga Larson.  It had existed, beneath the surface, ever since the night she had gone to supper with Galbraith.  It wasn’t that Olga believed Rose had taken Galbraith as a lover.  She hadn’t believed that even when she hurled the accusation against her.  The wounding thing was that Rose seemed not to care whether she believed it or not; had met her tempestuous pleas for forgiveness and her offers of unlimited love and faith “whatever Rose might do and however things might look,” with a cold distaste that hardly differed from the feeling she had shown in response to the tempest of angry accusation.  She told Olga, to be sure, that everything was all right; that the thing for both of them to do, was to treat the quarrel as if it hadn’t occurred.

This wasn’t what Olga wanted at all.  She wanted Rose as an emotional objective, to love passionately and be jealous of, and, for a moment now and then, hate, as a preliminary to another passionate reconciliation.

Rose had divined that this was so.  Indeed, she understood it far better than Olga did, having had to evade one or two “crushes” of a similar sort while she was at the university.  It was a sort of thing that went utterly against her instincts, and she was secretly glad that the quarrel on the opening night had given her a method of resisting this one that need not seem too utterly heartless.

Since the quarrel, Olga had been distant and dignified.  She had a grievance (that Rose, pretending to forgive her confessed mistake, had really not done so) but she was bearing it bravely.  Rose, when she could manage the manner, was good-humored and casual, and completely blind to the existence of the grievance Olga so nobly concealed.  But Olga’s wonderful good fortune, coming quite unheralded as it did, an advancement she had played with in her day-dreams, and never thought of as a realizable possibility, swept her out of her pose and carried her with a rush into Rose’s arms.

This happened not a quarter of an hour after Rose had secured Goldsmith’s consent to her own transfer to the Number Two company, and the first thing that registered on her mind was that she, who had taught Olga to talk, saved her her job, prevailed on Galbraith to dress her properly, and won her a chance for the space of that one song refrain, to make her individual appeal to the audience—­Rose, who had done all this, was now going out as a chorus-girl in the company of which Olga was the leading woman.  She didn’t regret Olga’s promotion, but she did wish, for herself, that she might have been spared just now, this ironic little cackle of laughter on the part of the malicious Goddess of Chance.