And then it had
appeared she'd have to talk! And, inexplicably to herself, her talking
wasn't right. The thing had just been another mirage. It was hopeless.
Galbraith would put her back into the chorus--drop her, likely enough,
altogether.
The thing that at first exasperated Rose and later, as she came vaguely
to understand it, aroused both her pity and her determination, was the
girl's strange, dully fatalistic acquiescence in it all. The sort of
circumstances that in Rose herself set the blood drumming through her
arteries, keyed her will to the very highest pitch, quickened her brain,
made her feel in some inexplicable way, confident and irresistible, laid
on this girl a paralyzing hand. It wasn't her fault that she didn't meet
her difficulties half-way with a vicious, driving offensive--rout them,
demoralize them. It was her tragedy.
"All right," Rose apostrophized them grimly. "This time you're up
against me."
"Look here!" she said to Olga, when the story was told (this was across
the table in the dingy lunch-room where, as Doris Dane, she had had her
first meal, and most of her subsequent ones), "look here, and listen to
what I'm going to tell you.
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