spinning, shook out her hair, and flung herself
backwards, till it streamed and eddied with the whirlwind of her
dance. In her fantastic dress (she wore her colours, the red and
black) her very womanhood had vanished, she was a mere insignificant
morsel of flesh and blood, inspired by the dizzy, reckless Fury of the
foot-lights.

There was a noise of many boots beating the floor of the house; it
grew into a thick, solid body of sound, torn at intervals by a
screaming whistle from the galleries. Someone up there shouted her
name--"Poppy--Poppy Grace!" and Rickman shivered.

To Rickman's mind the name was an outrage; it reeked of popularity; it
suggested--absurdly and abominably--a certain cheap drink of sudden
and ephemeral effervescence. He never let his mind dwell on those
dreadful syllables any longer than he could help; he never thought of
her as Poppy Grace at all. He thought of her in undefined,
extraordinary ways; now as some nameless aerial spirit, unaccountably
wandering about in a world too gross for it; and now as the Young Joy,
the fugitive actuality. To-night, after brandy and soda, his
imagination possessed itself of Poppy, and wove round her the glory
and gloom of the world. It saw in her, not the incarnation of the rosy
moment, but the eternal sacrifice of woman, the tragedy of her
abasement, her obedience to the world. Which, when he came to think of
it, was really very clever of his imagination.

Meanwhile Poppy was behaving, as she had behaved for the last fifty
nights, like a lunatic humming top. Now it had steadied itself in the
intensity of its speed; the little humming-top was sleeping. Poppy, as
she span, seemed to be standing, her feet rooted, her body swaying
delicately from the hips, like a flower rocked by the wind, the light
of her flickering flamewise. There was a stir, a wave, as if the heart
of the house had heaved. Pit and gallery breathed hard. Rickman leaned
forward with clouded eyes and troubled forehead, while the young
shop-men--the other young shop-men--thrilled with familiar and
delicious emotion. Now she curtsied, as she had curtsied for the last
fifty nights, bowing lower and lower till her hair fell over her face
and swept the stage; and now she shook her head till the great golden
whorl of hair seemed the only part of her left spinning; then Poppy
folded her arms and sank, sank till she sat on her heels, herself
invisible, curtained in modest and mystic fashion by her hair.