rthy of
pious preservation. Only in a Theater, sincerely consecrated to the
great god, Art, could the enlightened, the sophisticated, the
free--unite to worship. There only, they implied, could something
adumbrating a sacred ritual and a spiritual consolation be preserved.

Luckily for Susan, and indeed for us all--for we have all been gainers
from the spontaneous generation of "little theaters" all over America, a
phenomenon at its height just previous to the war--one village
enthusiast, Isidore Stalinski--by vocation an accompanist, by avocation
a vorticist, by race and nature a publicist--had succeeded in mildly
infecting Mona Leslie--who took everything in the air, though nothing
severely--with offhand zeal for his cause. The importance of her rather
casual conversion lay in the fact that her purse strings were
perpetually untied. Stalinski well knew that you cannot run even a tiny
temple for a handful of worshippers without vain oblations on the side
to the false gods of this world, and these imply--oh, Art's desire!--a
donor. And of all possible varieties of donor, that most to be desired
is the absentee donor--the donor who donates as God sends rain, unseen.

At precisely the right moment Stalinski whispered to Mona Leslie that
_entre them_--though he didn't care to be quoted--he preferred her
interpretation of Faure's _Clair de Lune_ to that of ----, the
particular _diva_ he had just been accompanying through a long,
rapturously advertised concert tour; and Mona Leslie, about to be off on
her European flight, became the absentee donor to _The Puppet Booth_.

The small stable was leased and cleansed and sufficiently reshaped to
live up to its anxiously chosen name. Much of the reshaping and all of
the decorating was done, after business hours, by the clever and pious
hands of the villagers. Then four one-act plays were selected from among
some hundreds poured forth by village genius to its rehabilitated god.
The clever and pious hands flew faster than ever, busying themselves
with scenery and costumes and properties and color and lighting--all
blended toward the creation of a thoroughly uncommercial atmosphere. And
the four plays were staged, directed, acted, and finally attended by the
Village. It was a perfectly lovely party and the pleasantest of times
was had by all.

And it only remains to drop this tone of patronizing persiflage and
admit, with humblest honesty, that the first night at _The Puppet Booth_