Miss Onslow was unmistakably the senior member of the chorus and had reached the happy period of an actress's life when she has no more need to bother about keeping her reminiscences too nicely in focus. She was, in fact, as even she herself admitted, not far off forty; in a railway train on a wet January afternoon the kindest observer would have assumed that her next landmark was fifty. A month ago Dorothy would have shuddered to find herself on an equality with such a person; but asperous is the astral road, and she had to make the best of Miss Onslow by treating her with at least as much cordiality as she would have shown to a small dressmaker from whom she wanted a dress by the end of the week. Gradually, as her new surroundings became familiar, Dorothy had brought herself to call Miss Onslow "Onzie," and though the abbreviation made her gorge rebel as from cod-liver oil, she bravely persevered. Instinctively she knew that this was the only woman in the chorus whose counsel she could trust, the only one who would honestly tell her if she looked better with or without an artificial teardrop. The sum of Onzie's experience was hers for the asking; the middle-aged actress was an academician of grease-paint, serving alike as a warning and an example to the student; while her knowledge of the various towns in which the company had dates was evidently profound. Already she had provided Dorothy with an address for Birmingham; but these rooms to be enjoyed without the prickings of extravagance required a third partner. Dorothy, anxious to profit still further by Onzie's experience, suggested that she should join Lily and herself; but that very experience for which the novice was greedy made the old professional shake her head: