Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Married people -- Fiction
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.
She was ashamed of the feeling--was she getting as small as that?--and,
in consequence, she congratulated Olga a good deal more warmly than
otherwise she would have done. But this warmer manner of hers opened
Olga's flood-gates so wide, swamped her in such a torrent of sentiment,
that Rose simply took to flight.
There was an element of real maternal pity in Rose's adoption of little
Dolly Darling as her chum. Dolly was obviously as fragile and ephemeral
as a transparent sand-fly. She had nothing that you could call a mind or
a character, even of the most rudimentary sort. She knew nothing, except
how to dance, and she knew that exactly as a kitten knows how to play
with a ball of string; she dreamed of diamonds and wonderful restaurants
and a sardonic hero nine feet tall with a straight nose and a long chin,
who would clutch her passionately in his arms (there was no more real
passion in her than there is in a soap-bubble) and murmur vows of
eternal adoration in her ears.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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