There he was again, bringing back the delicious terror! An astounding
situation!

But the door creaked. The babble from the stage invaded the room.
And in a second the enchantment was lifted from him. Several people
entered. He sighed, saying within himself to the disturbers:

"I'd have given you a hundred pounds apiece if you'd been five minutes
sooner."

And yet simultaneously he regretted their arrival. And, more curious
still, though he well remembered the warning words of Mr. Seven
Sachs concerning Elsie April, he did not consider that they were
justified.... She had not been a bit persuasive ... only....

VII

He sat down to the pianisto with a strange and agreeable sense of
security. It is true that, owing to the time of year, the drawing-room
had been, in the figurative phrase, turned upside down by the process
of spring-cleaning, which his unexpected arrival had surprised in
fullest activity. But he did not mind that. He abode content among
rolled carpets, a swathed chandelier, piled chairs, and walls full of
pale rectangular spaces where pictures had been. Early that
morning, after a brief night spent partly in bed and partly in erect
contemplation of his immediate past and his immediate future, he had
hurried back to his pianisto and his home--to the beings and things
that he knew and that knew him.

In the train he had had the pleasure of reading in sundry newspapers
that "The Orient Pearl," by Carlo Trent (who was mentioned in terms of
startling respect and admiration), had been performed on the previous
evening at the dramatic soiree of the Azure Society, with all the
usual accompaniments of secrecy and exclusiveness, in its private
theatre in Kensington, and had been accepted on the spot by Mr. E.H.
Machin ("that most enterprising and enlightened recruit to the ranks
of theatrical managers") for production at the new Regent Theatre. And
further that Mr. Machin intended to open with it. And still further
that his selection of such a play, which combined in the highest
degree the poetry of Mr. W.B. Yeats with the critical intellectuality
of Mr. Bernard Shaw, was an excellent augury for London's dramatic
future, and that the "upward movement" must on no account be thought
to have failed because of the failure of certain recent ill-judged
attempts, by persons who did not understand their business, to force
it in particular directions. And still further that he, Edward Henry,
had engaged for the