ooked like a terrified hen, and Mr.
Hartford, who was seriously attentive from beginning to end, and kept
murmuring, 'Really! Really!' And I had the poetess's sibylline profile
in full view. I was almost hysterical when it was over. As we were
coming out Mr. Hartford said to his wife, 'Henrietta, I'm glad we came.'
She rolled an eye on him and answered, with tears in the voice, 'Why?'
'It's a valuable lesson. We now know what the British public needs.' Her
reply was worthy of her."

"What was it?" said Elliot, eagerly.

"'There are many human needs, Gabriel, which it is criminal to gratify.'
Burling went home in a four-wheeler. Cummerbridge had left after the
first act--a severe attack of neuralgia in the right eye."

Elliot's full-throated laugh rang through the room. Heath was smiling,
but almost sadly, Charmian thought.

"Perhaps it was _My Little Darling_ which brought about the attempt at
better things you were speaking of," he said to Mrs. Mansfield.

"Ah, but their prophet is not mine!" she answered.

An almost feverish look of vitality had come into her face, which was
faintly pencilled by the fingers of sorrow.

"Sometimes I think I hate the disintegrating drama more than I despise
the vulgar idiocies which, after all, never really touch human life,"
she continued. "No doubt it is sheer weakness on my part to be affected
by it. But I am. Only last week Charmian and I saw the play that
they--the superior ones--are all flocking to. The Premier has seen it
five times already. I loathed its cleverness. I loathed the element of
surprise in it. I laughed, and loathed my own laughter. The man who
wrote it would put cap and bells on St. Francis of Assisi and make a
mock of OEdipus."

She paused, then, leaning forward, in a low and thrilling voice she
quoted, "'For we are in Thy hand; and man's noblest task is to help
others by his best means and powers.'"

Claude Heath gazed at her while she was speaking, and in his eyes
Charmian, glancing over her fan, saw what she thought of as two torches
gleaming.

"I came out of the theater," continued Mrs. Mansfield, "and I confess it
with shame, feeling as if I should never find again the incentive to a
noble action, as if the world were turned to chaff. And yet I had
laughed--how I had laughed!"

Suddenly she began to laugh at the mere recollection of something in the
play.

"The wretch is terribly clever!" she exclaimed. "But he seems to me
destructive."

"We