Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Married people -- Fiction
She went with Rose up to the little three-dollar room. Rose put her into
a chair, sat down opposite her, took the first phrase of her first
speech, and said it very slowly, very quietly, half a dozen times. That
was at half past eleven o'clock at night. By midnight, Olga could say
those first three words, if not to Rose's complete satisfaction, at
least a lot better. She went on and finished the sentence. They worked
straight through the night, except that two or three times the girl
broke down; said it was hopeless. She got up once and said that she was
going home, whereupon Rose locked the door and put the key in her
stocking. She sulked once, and for fifteen minutes wouldn't say a word.
But by seven o'clock in the morning, when they went back to the
lunch-room and ate an enormous breakfast, Olga's sluggish blood was
fired at last. It was a profane thought, but you _could_ take the Fatal
Sisters by the hair and coerce a change in the pattern they were
weaving.
And Rose, by that time, by the plain brute force of necessity, was a
teacher of phonetics. She'd discovered how she made sounds herself and
had, with the aid of a hand mirror, developed a rough-and-ready
technique for demonstrating how it was done. She remembered, with bitter
regret, a course she had dozed through at the university, dreaming about
the half-back, which, had she only listened to the professor instead,
would be doing her solid service now. Had there been other courses like
that, she wondered vaguely? Had the education she had spent fifteen
years or so on an actual relation to life after all? It was a startling
idea.
She walked Olga out to the park and back at seven-thirty, and at eight
they were up in her room again. They raided the delicatessen at eleven
o'clock, and made an exiguous meal on the plunder. And at twelve, husky
of voice, but indomitable of mind, they, with the others, confronted
Galbraith upon the stage in North End Hall.
"Do you suppose," Olga said during the preliminary bustle of getting
started, "that he's put any one else in my part already?"
It was a fear Rose had entertained, but had avoided suggesting to her
pupil.
"I don't believe so," she said. "If he has, I'll talk to him."
"No, you won't!" said Olga. "I'll talk to him myself."
There was a ring to that decision that did Rose's heart good. It took a
long time to get that northern blood on fire, but when you did, you
could count on its not going cold again overnight.
It got pretty exciting of course, as the scene between Sylvia and the
sextette drew near, and when it came, Rose could hardly manage her own
first line--hung over it a second, indeed, before she could make her
voice work at all, and drew a sharp look of inquiry from Galbraith. But
on Olga's first cue, her line was spoken with no hesitation at all, and
in tone, pitch and inflection, it was almost a phonographic copy of the
voice that had served it for a model.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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