e you
better every time I see you in that necklace." Lady Dolly clasped her
hands, with her fan in them, in the abandonment of her affection, and
"love you better" floated back and dispersed itself among the men.
Alicia smiled the necessary acknowledgment. All the women she knew
made compliments to her; it was a kind of cult among them. The men had
sometimes an air of envying their freedom of tongue. "Don't say that,"
she returned lightly, "or Herbert will never give me any diamonds." She
too looked her approval of Lady Dolly's bodice, but said nothing. It
was doubtless precisely because she disdained certain forms of feminine
barter that she got so much for nothing.

"And where," demanded Lady Dolly, in an electric whisper, "did you find
that dear sweet little priest? Do introduce him to me--at least by and
by, when I've thought of something to say. Let me see, wasn't it Good
Friday last week? I'll ask him if he had hot-cross buns--or do people
eat those on Boxing Day? Pancakes come in somewhere, if one could only
be sure!"

Stephen clung persistently to the back of the box. His senses were
filled for the moment by its other occupants, the men in the fresh
correctness of their evening dress, whose least gesture seemed to spring
from an indefinite fulness of life, the two women in front, a kind of
lustrous tableau of what it was possible to choose and to enjoy. They
were grouped and shut off in a high light which seemed to proceed partly
from the usual sources and partly from their own personalities; he saw
them in a way which underlined their significance at every point. It
seemed to Stephen that in a manner he profaned this temple of what he
held to be poorest and cheapest in life, a paradox of which he was
but dimly aware in his dejection. A sharp impression of his physical
inferiority to the other men assailed him; his appreciation of their
muscular shoulders had a rasp in it. For once the poverty of spirit to
which he held failed to offer him a refuge, his eye wandered restlessly
as if attempting futile reconciliations, and the thing most present with
him was the worn-all-day feeling about the neck of his cassock. He
fixed his attention presently in a climax of passive discomfort on the
curtain, where unconsciously, his gaze crept with a subtle interrogation
in it to the wide eyeballs of the Sphinx.

The stalls gradually filled, although it was a second production, in the
middle of the week, and although the gal