ith anything
but impatience if he had met her original person, and her reflection,
her reproduction, seemed to him frivolous and meaningless. If he went
then, however, he would go as he came, in so far as the play was
concerned; the first act, relying altogether upon the jugglery of its
dialogue, gave no clue to anything. He owed it to Hilda, after all, to
see the piece out. It was only fair to give her a chance to make the
best of it. He decided that it was worth a personal sacrifice to give it
her and went back.

He was sufficiently indignant with the leading idea of the play, and
sufficiently absorbed in its progress, at the end of the second act, to
permit Lady Dolly to capture him before it occurred to him that he had
the use of his legs. Her enthusiasm was so great that it reduced him to
something like equivocation. She wanted to know if anything could be
more splendid than Mr. Bradley as Lord Ingleton; she confided to Stephen
that that was what she called _real_ wickedness, the kind that did the
most harm, and invited him, by inference, to a liberal judgment of
stupid sinners. He sat emitting short unsmiling sentences with eyes
nervously fugitive from Lady Dolly's too proximate opulence until the
third act began. Then he gave place with embarrassed alacrity to Colonel
Cummins, and folded his arms again at the back of the box.

Before it was finished he had the gratification of recognising at least
one Hilda that he knew. The newspapers found in her interpretation the
development of a soul, and one remembered, reading them, that a _cliche_
is a valuable thing in a hurry. A phrase which spoke of a soul bruised
out of life and rushing to annihilation would have been more precise.
The demand upon her increased steadily as the act went on, and as she
met it, there slipped into her acting some of her own potentialities of
motive and of passion. She offered to the shaping circumstance rich
material and abundant plasticity, and when the persecution of her
destiny required her to throw herself irretrievably away, she did it
with a splendid appreciation of large and definite movements that was
essentially of herself.

The moment of it had a bold gruesomeness that caught the breath--a
disinterment on the stage in search of letters that would prove the
charge against the second year of Mrs. Halliday's married life, her
letters buried with the poet. It was an advantage which only the husband
of Mrs. Halliday would have cla