When she walked back to the hotel along Main Street the lassitude that had so long held her half-paralyzed was gone.  She was the old Rose again; the Rose whom Galbraith would have recognized.

She didn’t know it.  She was conscious of nothing but a hot determination that had not, as yet, even expressed itself in terms.  It was just a newly kindled fire that warmed her shivering spirit; that made her fearless; in a quite unreasoning way, confident.

The only touch of self-conscious thought about her was a vague wonder at her long submission.  What had she been doing all that while, drifting like that, letting herself be beaten like that, consenting to live amid the shabby degradations of the life that had surrounded her ever since the company had gone on the road?  The sense of the unreality of those past weeks grew stronger.  She felt like a person just waking out of a long troubled dream.

She mode her way among the loungers in the lobby of the hotel, not unmindful of their stares, but magnificently impervious to them; came up to the desk and told the clerk she wanted to see the proprietor.

“Nothing doing,” said the clerk.

Then as he got the straight look of her eyes, he amended his speech a little.

“It won’t do you any good to see him,” he said sulkily.

“I’ll see him, if you please,” said Rose.  “Will you have him called?”

The clerk hesitated.  Stranded “actresses” weren’t in the habit of talking like that.  They always wanted to see the proprietor, they were always on the point of receiving an ample remittance from some generally distant place.  They were often very queenly, incredibly outraged that their solvency should be questioned.  But their voices never had the cool confident ring that this girl’s voice had, nor the look in their eyes, the purposeful thrust.

He hesitated uncomfortably.  Then his difficulty was solved for him.

“There he goes now,” he said.  “You can talk to him if you like.”

The proprietor was sixty years old, perhaps; gray, stooped, stringy of neck.  He had a short-cropped mustache, one corner of which he was always caressing with a protruding under-lip.  He had a good shrewd pair of eyes, not altogether unkindly.  Rose had seen him before, but hadn’t known who he was.

He was making, just now, for a little office he had, that opened into the railed-off space behind the desk, and, by another door, into the corridor.  He had another man with him, but it was evident that their business wasn’t going to take long.  The door into the corridor was left open behind them, and there Rose waited.  When the other man came out, she stepped inside.

There was nothing kindly about the look the proprietor’s eyes directed at her when he saw who she was.  He looked up at her with a frown of resignation.

“So you didn’t go to Chicago with the rest of the troupe?” he said.  “That’s where you made a mistake, I guess.”