“I came to Centropolis day before yesterday,” said Rose, “with a theatrical company that failed.  They went away this morning unpaid, with nothing but tickets to Chicago.  I decided to stay here and try to get work.  I applied for it at five places on Main Street this morning, and then went to Mr. Culver at the hotel.  I asked him for a position as a waitress.”

Already the judge was tapping his pencil.

“This doesn’t concern me in the least,” he said.  “I have no possible employment for you.  I can do nothing for you.  Good day!”

“Employment isn’t what I want from you,” said Rose.  “I’ll come to what I do want in a minute.”

It is safe to say that the judge hadn’t been caught up with a round turn like that in years.  He stared at her now in perfectly blank amazement.

“Mr. Culver,” she went on, “told me why I hadn’t been successful.  He accused me of being the sort of person no decent employer would give work to, of being a person of bad character.  I convinced him, I think, that I was not.  Then he said that even though I were a perfectly honest, decent woman, he wouldn’t dare put me in his dining-room.  He cited you as the reason.”

At that the judge suddenly went purple.

“Me!” he shouted.

The tension of Rose’s body relaxed a little.  A smile flickered just instantaneously over her mouth.

“He used you as an example,” she explained.  “He said that you were the most important person in the county; that your opinion counted for the most.  He said that you were a regular patron of his hotel, and that you’d object seriously to giving your order, as he said, to a ’busted actress.’”

“That’s perfectly unwarranted,” fumed the judge.  “Culver had no right to use my name like that.  It’s outrageous!”

“I hoped you’d feel that way,” said Rose.

The judge pounded on the desk.  “That’s not what I mean.  He had no right to drag me into it at all; into a miserable business like that.”

“It is a miserable business,” Rose assented.  “It’s a thoroughly contemptible business.  But Mr. Culver didn’t drag you into it deliberately.  You were passing the door as we stood talking, and he used you for an illustration.  But afterward he said that if you told him it was all right to give me a job, he would do it.  That’s what I have come up to ask you to do.”

“That,” said the judge, setting his teeth and breathing hard, “is the most monstrous piece of impudence I have ever heard of.  On his part as well as yours.  What have I to do with John Culver’s waitresses?”

He wasn’t expecting an answer to this question, but Rose had one ready for him.

“You’ve given him the idea, without meaning to most likely, that you wouldn’t tolerate a girl among them who’d been earning her living on the stage.  If that’s just a stupid mistake of his, I’m asking you to tell him so.”

“Well, I won’t,” said the judge.  “The thing’s preposterous.  You’re asking me for what amounts to a guarantee.  In the first place, I don’t know that you’re not—­after all—­what you say you convinced Culver that you were not.”