ost brilliant, worldly,
the most enchantingly gay scene I had ever looked upon. I had never seen
champagne bottles opened on the stage before--indeed, I had never seen
them opened anywhere. The memory of that supper makes me hungry now;
the sight of it then, when I had only a students' boarding-house dinner
behind me, was delicate torment. I seem to remember gilded chairs and
tables (arranged hurriedly by footmen in white gloves and stockings),
linen of dazzling whiteness, glittering glass, silver dishes, a great
bowl of fruit, and the reddest of roses. The room was invaded by
beautiful women and dashing young men, laughing and talking together.
The men were dressed more or less after the period in which the play was
written; the women were not. I saw no inconsistency. Their talk seemed
to open to one the brilliant world in which they lived; every sentence
made one older and wiser, every pleasantry enlarged one's horizon.
One could experience excess and satiety without the inconvenience
of learning what to do with one's hands in a drawing-room! When the
characters all spoke at once and I missed some of the phrases they
flashed at each other, I was in misery. I strained my ears and eyes to
catch every exclamation.

The actress who played Marguerite was even then old-fashioned, though
historic. She had been a member of Daly's famous New York company, and
afterward a 'star' under his direction. She was a woman who could not be
taught, it is said, though she had a crude natural force which carried
with people whose feelings were accessible and whose taste was not
squeamish. She was already old, with a ravaged countenance and a
physique curiously hard and stiff. She moved with difficulty--I think
she was lame--I seem to remember some story about a malady of the spine.
Her Armand was disproportionately young and slight, a handsome youth,
perplexed in the extreme. But what did it matter? I believed devoutly in
her power to fascinate him, in her dazzling loveliness. I believed her
young, ardent, reckless, disillusioned, under sentence, feverish, avid
of pleasure. I wanted to cross the footlights and help the slim-waisted
Armand in the frilled shirt to convince her that there was still loyalty
and devotion in the world. Her sudden illness, when the gaiety was at
its height, her pallor, the handkerchief she crushed against her lips,
the cough she smothered under the laughter while Gaston kept playing the
piano lightly--it all wru