lery and the rupee seats under
it were nearly empty. The piece accounted for both. When Duff Lindsay
said at dinner that it wasn't "up to much," he spoke, I fancy, from
the nearest point of view he could take to that of the Order of St.
Barnabas. As a matter of fact, The Victim of Virtue was up to a very
great deal, but its points were so delicate that one must have been
educated rather broadly to grasp them, which is again perhaps a foolish
contrariety of terms. At all events they carried no appeal to the
theatre-goers from the sailing ships in the river or the regiments in
the fort, who turned as one than that night to Jimmy Finnigan.

Stephen was aware, in the abstract, of what he might expect. He savoured
the enterprises of the London theatres weekly in the Saturday Review;
he had cast a remotely observing eye upon the productions of this
particular playwright through that medium for a long time. They formed
a manifestation of the outer world fit enough to draw a glance of
speculation from the inner; their author was an acrobat of ideas.
Doubtless we are all clowns in the eyes of the angels, yet we have the
habit of supposing that they sometimes look down upon us. It was thus,
if the parallel is not exaggerated, that Arnold regarded the author of
The Victim of Virtue. His attitude was quite taken before the orchestra
ceased playing; it was made of negation rather than criticism, on the
basis that he had no concern with, and no knowledge of, such things.
Deliberately he gave his mind a surface which should shed promiscuous
invitation, and folded his lips as it were, against the rising of the
curtain. He thought of Hilda separately, and he looked for her upon the
boards with the simplicity of a desire to see the woman he knew.

When finally he did see her she made before him a picture that was to
remain with him always as his last impression of an art from which in
all its manifestations on that night he definitely turned. From the
aigrette in her hair to the paste buckle on her shoe she was mondaine.
Her dress, of some indefinite, slight white material, clasped at the
waist with a belt that gave the beam of turquoises and the gleam of
silver, ministered as much to the capricious ideal of the moment as
to the lines and curves of the person it adorned. The set was the
inevitable modern drawing-room, and she sat well out on a sofa, with her
hands, in long black gloves, resting stiffly, palm downward on each side
of her