His manner wasn't quite so harsh as his words, but it convinced her that he meant every one of them right to the foot of the letter.
She couldn't answer for a moment. She hadn't guessed that the choice he was going to offer her would be between taking the little part he had given her and playing it for all it was worth, defiant of Rodney's feelings and of the scandal of the Lake Shore Drive--and going back to her three-dollar room this afternoon, out of a job and without even a glimmering chance of finding another.
"Take your time," he said. "I don't want to be a brute about it, but look here! Try to see it my way for a minute. Here are my employers, the owners of this piece. They're putting thousands of dollars into the production of it. They've hired me to make that production a success. Well, I don't know about other games, but this game's a battle. If we win, it will be because we put every bit of steam and every bit of confidence we've got into it and _make_ it win. That goes for me, and for the principals, and right down through to the last girl in the chorus. Every night there'll be a new audience out there that you will have to fight--shake up out of the grouch they get when they pay for their tickets; persuade to laugh and loosen up and come and play with you.
"Will you be able to do your share, do you suppose, if you're slinking around, afraid of being recognized? We don't care whether your pussy-cat friends get their fur rubbed the wrong way or not. The only thing we care about is putting this show across. Well, if you feel the way we do about it, if you can make it the one thing you do care about, too--why, come along. Let the pussy-cats go ..." He finished with a snap of his fingers.
"The only one that really matters isn't a pussy-cat," said Rose, with a reluctant wide smile, "and--he'd agree with you altogether, if he didn't know you were talking to me. And I'm really very much obliged to you."
"No flutters?" questioned Galbraith. "No eleventh-hour repentance?"
John Galbraith went away satisfied. Rose had the same power that he had, of making a simple unemphatic statement irresistibly convincing. When she said that she would go through, he knew that unless struck by lightning, she would. But there had been something at once ironic and tender about the girl's smile, when she had spoken of the only one who really mattered, that he couldn't account for. Who was the only one that really mattered, anyway? Her husband? He didn't think it likely. Young women who quarreled with their husbands and ran away from them to go on the stage, wouldn't, as far as his experience went, be likely to smile over them like that. More probably a brother--a younger brother, perhaps, fiercely proud as such a boy would be of such a sister.