wing-like beating of fans, and the restless curving of arms. She had not
visited London for many years, and this multitudinous and wholesale
opulence startled her. Under other circumstances she would have enjoyed
it intensely, and basked in it as a flower in the sunshine; to-night,
however, she could not dismiss the image of Rose in the gaunt hospital
in Lamb's Conduit Street. She knew the comparison was crude; she assured
herself that there must always be rich and poor, idle and industrious,
gay and sorrowful, elegant and shabby, arrogant and meek; but her
discomfort none the less persisted, and she had the uneasy feeling that
the whole of civilisation was wrong, and that Rose and the earnest ones
were justified in their scorn of such as her. And concurrently she dwelt
upon Ethel and Fred at that hour, and listened with anxiety for the
opening of the box-door and the entry of Arthur Twemlow.

She imagined that owing to their late arrival she must have missed the
one essential clue to the plot of _The Dolmenico Doll_, and as the
gorgeously decorated action was developed on the dazzling stage she
tried in vain to grasp its significance. The fall of the curtain came as
a surprise to her. The end of the first act had left her with nothing
but a confused notion of the interior of a confectioner's shop, and
young men therein getting tipsy and stealing kisses, and marvellously
pretty girls submitting to the robbery with a nonchalance born of three
hundred and fifty four similar experiences; and old men grotesque in a
dissolute senility; and sudden bursts of orchestral music, and simpering
ballads, and comic refrains and crashing choruses; and lights,
_lingerie_, picture-hats and short skirts; and over all, dominating all,
the set, eternal, mechanical, bored smile of the pretty girls.

'Awfully good, isn't it?' said Harry, when the generous applause had
ceased.

'It's simply lovely,' Milly agreed, fidgeting on her chair in juvenile
rapture.

'Yes,' Leonora admitted. And she indeed thought that parts of it were
amusing and agreeable.

'Of course,' Harry remarked hastily to Leonora, '_Princess Puck_ isn't
at all like this. It's an idyll sort of thing, you know. By the way,
hadn't I better go out and offer a reward for the recovery of Twemlow?'

He returned just as the curtain went up, bringing a faint odour of
whisky, but without Twemlow.

A few moments later, while the principal pretty girl was warbling an
invitation t