er to meet
criticism was evidently at the start to be sure her make-up had had the
last touch and that she looked at least no worse than usual. Aunt
Maud's appreciation of that to-night was indeed managerial, and the
performer's own contribution fairly that of the faultless soldier on
parade. Densher saw himself for the moment as in his purchased stall at
the play; the watchful manager was in the depths of a box and the poor
actress in the glare of the footlights. But she _passed_, the poor
performer--he could see how she always passed; her wig, her paint, her
jewels, every mark of her expression impeccable, and her entrance
accordingly greeted with the proper round of applause. Such impressions
as we thus note for Densher come and go, it must be granted, in very
much less time than notation demands; but we may none the less make the
point that there was, still further, time among them for him to feel
almost too scared to take part in the ovation. He struck himself as
having lost, for the minute, his presence of mind--so that in any case
he only stared in silence at the older woman's technical challenge and
at the younger one's disciplined face. It was as if the drama--it thus
came to him, for the fact of a drama there was no blinking--was between
_them_, them quite preponderantly; with Merton Densher relegated to
mere spectatorship, a paying place in front, and one of the most
expensive. This was why his appreciation had turned for the instant to
fear--had just turned, as we have said, to sickness; and in spite of
the fact that the disciplined face did offer him over the footlights,
as he believed, the small gleam, fine faint but exquisite, of a special
intelligence. So might a practised performer, even when raked by
double-barrelled glasses, seem to be all in her part and yet convey a
sign to the person in the house she loved best.

The drama, at all events, as Densher saw it, meanwhile went
on--amplified soon enough by the advent of two other guests, stray
gentlemen both, stragglers in the rout of the season, who visibly
presented themselves to Kate during the next moments as subjects for a
like impersonal treatment and sharers in a like usual mercy. At
opposite ends of the social course, they displayed, in respect to the
"figure" that each, in his way, made, one the expansive, the other the
contractile effect of the perfect white waistcoat. A scratch company of
two innocuous youths and a pacified veteran was therefo