The intensity with which he was staring at her made her look away and her eyes rested on a young man whose strong family likeness to the proprietor identified him for her as his son; he had come up and was waiting for a word with his father. At this question he stared at her too.
The older man whipped around on his son. "Clear out, Jim," he said sharply. And then to Rose: "You haven't answered my question."
"I was a member of that company," she said. "But ..."
"We have no vacancy at present," he said sharply. "Good day."
She flinched a little but stood her ground. "I said I wasn't experienced as a saleswoman," she said, "but there are some things I know a good deal about—clothes and hats...."
He hadn't stayed to listen; had walked straight to the door and opened it. Reluctantly she followed him.
"There's no place," he said, "in this store, or I trust in the town either, for young women of your sort. Good day!"
Rose made five more applications for work on Main Street, all with the same result. Some of those who refused her were panicky about it; one threatened to have her put in jail. One looked knowing and after he had expressed in jocular though emphatic terms, his sense of her impossibility as a publicly acknowledged employee, intimated a desire to prosecute a personal acquaintance with her further.
She had left the first store incredulous rather than angry, under the impression that she had encountered a chance fanatic. It seemed impossible that anybody with a well-balanced mind, could treat her as if she carried contamination, merely because she had earned a living for a while in the chorus of a musical comedy. It was fortunate for her that her first applications were met by anger, rude discourtesy, and openly avowed suspicion, because this treatment roused in her, for the first time in months, a strong surge of indignation. Her blood came up after these encounters, nearer and nearer the boiling point. The man who smiled at her like a satyr, was shriveled by the blaze of her blue eyes, and was left, red-faced, blustering weakly after her.
When she walked back to the hotel along Main Street the lassitude that had so long held her half-paralyzed was gone. She was the old Rose again; the Rose whom Galbraith would have recognized.