But he parried this with his unfailing humour.
“I guess I’m too sick to risk that.”
He passed his hand through her arm with the conjugal
gesture familiar to Apex City. “Come along
down to dinner, mother—I guess Undine won’t
mind if I don’t rig up to-night.”
She had looked down at them, enviously, from the balcony—she
had looked up at them, reverentially, from the stalls;
but now at last she was on a line with them, among
them, she was part of the sacred semicircle whose
privilege it is, between the acts, to make the mere
public forget that the curtain has fallen.
As she swept to the left-hand seat of their crimson
niche, waving Mabel Lipscomb to the opposite corner
with a gesture learned during her apprenticeship in
the stalls, Undine felt that quickening of the faculties
that comes in the high moments of life. Her consciousness
seemed to take in at once the whole bright curve of
the auditorium, from the unbroken lines of spectators
below her to the culminating blaze of the central
chandelier; and she herself was the core of that vast
illumination, the sentient throbbing surface which
gathered all the shafts of light into a centre.
It was almost a relief when, a moment later, the lights
sank, the curtain rose, and the focus of illumination
was shifted. The music, the scenery, and the
movement on the stage, were like a rich mist tempering
the radiance that shot on her from every side, and
giving her time to subside, draw breath, adjust herself
to this new clear medium which made her feel so oddly
brittle and transparent.
When the curtain fell on the first act she began to
be aware of a subtle change in the house. In
all the boxes cross-currents of movement had set in:
groups were coalescing and breaking up, fans waving
and heads twinkling, black coats emerging among white
shoulders, late comers dropping their furs and laces
in the red penumbra of the background. Undine,
for the moment unconscious of herself, swept the house
with her opera-glass, searching for familiar faces.
Some she knew without being able to name them—fixed
figure-heads of the social prow—others she
recognized from their portraits in the papers; but
of the few from whom she could herself claim recognition
not one was visible, and as she pursued her investigations
the whole scene grew blank and featureless.
Almost all the boxes were full now, but one, just
opposite, tantalized her by its continued emptiness.
How queer to have an opera-box and not use it!
What on earth could the people be doing—what
rarer delight could they be tasting? Undine remembered
that the numbers of the boxes and the names of their
owners were given on the back of the programme, and
after a rapid computation she turned to consult the
list. Mondays and Fridays, Mrs. Peter Van Degen.
That was it: the box was empty because Mrs. Van
Degen was dining alone with Ralph Marvell! “Peter
