assembly
to obliterate Minna Freund! She was, that night, exceptionally repulsive
in a sort of yellow silk wrapper, with her sparrow's nest of bobbed
Henner hair, and her long, bare, olive-green neck, that so obviously
needed to be scrubbed!

Having strung certain entirely unrelated words together and called them
"Portents," she had in those days acquired a minor notoriety, and
Susan--impishly enjoying my consequent embarrassment--had once
introduced me to her as an admirer of her work, at an exhibition of
Cubist sculpture. Minna was standing at the time, I recalled, before
Pannino's "Study of a Morbid Complex," and she at once informed me that
the morbid complex in question had been studied from the life. She had
posed her own destiny for Pannino, so she assured me, at three separate
moments of psychic crisis, and the inevitable result had been a
masterpiece. "How it writhes!" she had exclaimed: but to my uninstructed
eyes Pannino's Study did anything but writhe; it was stolidly passive;
it looked precisely as an ostrich egg on a pedestal would look if viewed
in a slightly convex mirror.... How far away all that stupid nonsense
seems!

And, suddenly, Jimmy leaped on the bench beside me as if punctured by a
pin: "Oh, good Lord, Mr. Hunt!" he groaned. "Look here!"

He had thrust his program before me and was pointing to the third play
of the series with an unsteady finger.

"It's the same name," he whispered hoarsely; "the one she's used for her
book. Do you think----"

"I'll soon find out," was my answer. "We must know what we're in for,
Jimmy!" And just as the lights were lowered for the second play I rose,
defying audible unpopularity, and squeezed my way out to the door. That
is why I cannot describe for you the second play, a harsh little tragedy
of the sweatshops--"Horrible," Jimmy affirmed, "but it kind of _got_
me!"--written by an impecunious young man with expensive tastes, who has
since won the means of gratifying them along Broadway by concocting for
that golden glade his innocently naughty librettos--"_Tra-la, Therese!_"
and "_Oh, Mercy, Modestine!_"

Having sought and interviewed Stalinski--I found him huddled in the tiny
box-office, perspiring unpleasantly from nervousness and many soaring
emotions--I was back in my seat, more unpopular than ever, in good time
for Susan's--it was unquestionably Susan's--play.

But most of you have read, or have seen, or have read about, Susan's
play....

It was