“I wouldn’t care,” Olga said.  “You’d be locked up, too.  Because you aren’t any further along than I am.”

“I’m going to be, though,” said Rose, “in about two minutes.”  The thought of what John Galbraith’s disgust would be, in spite of his good-natured assurance she needn’t hurry, if she really kept him waiting, set her at her task with flying fingers.

“There’s no use hurrying,” Olga commented on this burst of speed, “because you’re going to wait for me.  This is my night.  We’ll have a little table all by ourselves at Max’s and then you’ll come up and sleep with me to-night.”

An instinct prompted Rose to defer the necessary negative to this suggestion until the last of the other girls, who was just then pinning on her hat, should have gone.  When the door clicked, she said she was sorry but the plan couldn’t be carried out.

Olga looked at her intensely.  “I need you to-night,” she said, “and if you care anything about me at all you’ll come.”

“I’d come if I could,” said Rose, “but it can’t be managed.  I’ve promised to do something else.”

Olga’s face paled a little and her eyes burned.  “So that’s it, is it?” she said furiously.  “You’re going out with Galbraith.”  She went on to say more than that, but her meaning was plain at the first words.

Rose looked at her a little incredulous, quite cool, so far as her mind went (because, of course, Olga’s accusation was merely grotesque) but curiously and most unpleasantly stirred, disgusted almost to the point of nausea.  She stopped the tirade, not because she cared what the girl was saying, but because she couldn’t stay in the room with a person making that sort of an exhibition of herself.  It took no more than half a dozen words to accomplish this result.  The mere fact that she spoke, after that rather long blank period of speechlessness, and the cold blaze of her blue eyes that accompanied her words, effected more than the words themselves.  And then, in a tempest of tears and self-reproaches, Olga repented—­a phase of the situation which was worse, almost, than the former one, because it couldn’t be dealt with quite so summarily.

But Rose went on dressing as fast as she could all the while, and at last, long before Olga had begun putting on her street clothes, she was ready to go.  With her hand on the door-latch she paused.

“I am going to have supper with Mr. Galbraith,” she said.  “He told me there was something he wanted to talk to me about.”  And with that she let herself out of the room, indifferent to the effect these last words of hers might produce.

She caught sight of Galbraith down at the end of the corridor waiting for her, but she paused a moment, pulled in a long breath and grinned at herself.  In the state of mind she was in just then, divided between her impatience to get back to her own room where her thoughts could be free to run upon the one theme they welcomed, and her wrath and disgust over the scene Olga had just subjected her to, the poor man was in danger of having a pretty unsatisfactory sort of hour with her.  She must brace up and really try to be nice to him.