erior of the great actress's
dressing-room. It was fitted and filled with looking-glasses at every
angle of refraction, so that they looked like the hundred facets of one
huge diamond--if one could get inside a diamond. The other features of
luxury, a few flowers, a few coloured cushions, a few scraps of stage
costume, were multiplied by all the mirrors into the madness of the
Arabian Nights, and danced and changed places perpetually as the
shuffling attendant shifted a mirror outwards or shot one back against
the wall.

They both spoke to the dingy dresser by name, calling him Parkinson, and
asking for the lady as Miss Aurora Rome. Parkinson said she was in the
other room, but he would go and tell her. A shade crossed the brow of
both visitors; for the other room was the private room of the great
actor with whom Miss Aurora was performing, and she was of the kind that
does not inflame admiration without inflaming jealousy. In about half
a minute, however, the inner door opened, and she entered as she always
did, even in private life, so that the very silence seemed to be a roar
of applause, and one well-deserved. She was clad in a somewhat strange
garb of peacock green and peacock blue satins, that gleamed like blue
and green metals, such as delight children and aesthetes, and her heavy,
hot brown hair framed one of those magic faces which are dangerous to
all men, but especially to boys and to men growing grey. In company with
her male colleague, the great American actor, Isidore Bruno, she was
producing a particularly poetical and fantastic interpretation of
Midsummer Night's Dream: in which the artistic prominence was given
to Oberon and Titania, or in other words to Bruno and herself. Set in
dreamy and exquisite scenery, and moving in mystical dances, the
green costume, like burnished beetle-wings, expressed all the elusive
individuality of an elfin queen. But when personally confronted in what
was still broad daylight, a man looked only at the woman's face.

She greeted both men with the beaming and baffling smile which kept so
many males at the same just dangerous distance from her. She accepted
some flowers from Cutler, which were as tropical and expensive as his
victories; and another sort of present from Sir Wilson Seymour, offered
later on and more nonchalantly by that gentleman. For it was against
his breeding to show eagerness, and against his conventional
unconventionality to give anything so obvious as f