Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Married people -- Fiction
But she wasn't long in abandoning the notion of appealing to Jimmy at
all. The corner-stone of her new adventure must be that she was doing
things for herself; that she was through being helped, having ways
smoothed for her, things done for her. If she owed her first job even
indirectly to Jimmy, all the rest of her structure would be out of
plumb. Whatever success she might have would be tainted by the misgiving
that but for somebody else's help, she might have failed. Rose Stanton
who had rented that three-dollar room was going to be beholden to
nobody!
The news item in the paper gave her really all she needed. It told her
that a production was in rehearsal and it mentioned the name of the
director, John Galbraith, referring to him as one of the three most
prominent musical-comedy directors in the country; imported from New
York at vast expense, to make this production unique in the annals of
the Globe, and so forth.
They hadn't rehearsed Jimmy's piece, she knew, in the theater itself,
but in all sorts of queer out-of-the-way places--in theaters that
happened for the moment to be "dark," in dance-halls; pretty much
anywhere. This was because there was another show running at the time at
the Globe. She had looked in the theater advertisements to see whether a
show was running there now. Yes, there was. Well, that gave her her
formula.
When she asked at the box office at the Globe Theater, where they were
rehearsing _The Girl Up-stairs_ to-day, the nicely manicured young man
inside, answered automatically, "North End Hall."
Evidently Jimmy Wallace couldn't have phrased the question better
himself. But the quality of the voice that asked it had, even to his not
very sensitive ear, an unaccustomed flavor. So, almost simultaneously
with his answer, he looked up from his finger-nails and shot an
inquiring glance through the grille.
What he saw betrayed him into an involuntary stare. He didn't mean to
stare; he meant to be respectful. But he was surprised. Rose, in the
plainest suit that she could hope would seem plausible to her servants
for a traveling costume to California, an ulster and a little beaver hat
with a quill in it, had no misgivings about looking the part of a
potentially hard-working young woman renting a three-dollar room on
North Clark Street and seeking employment in a musical-comedy chorus. A
realization that her neat black seal dressing-case wasn't quite in the
picture, helped to account for the landlady's puzzlement about her. But
it hadn't been introduced in evidence here. And yet the young man behind
the grille seemed as surprised as the landlady.
He repeated his answer to her question with the lubricant of a few more
words and a fatuous sort of smile. "I believe they rehearse in the North
End Hall this afternoon."
Rose couldn't help smiling a little herself. "I'm afraid," she said,
"I'll have to ask where that is."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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