The revue being a failure, the auditorium was more than half empty.  In the Promenade to each man there were at least five pretty ladies, and the ladies looked gloomily across many rows of vacant seats at the bright proscenium where jocularities of an exacerbating tedium were being enacted.  Not that the jocularities were inane beyond the usual, but failure made them seem so.  None had the slightest idea why the revue had failed; for precisely similar revues, concocted according to the same recipe and full of the same jocularities executed by the same players at the same salaries, had crowded the theatre for many months together.  It was an incomprehensible universe.

Christine suddenly shrugged her shoulders and walked out.  What use in staying to the end?

It was long after ten o’clock, and an exquisite faint light lingering in the sky still revealed the features of the people in the streets.  The man who had devoted half a life to the ingenious project of lengthening the summer days by altering clocks was in his disappointed grave; but victory had come to him there, for statesmen had at last proved the possibility of that which they had always maintained to be impossible, and the wisdom of that which they had always maintained to be idiotic.  The voluptuous divine melancholy of evening June descended upon the city from the sky, and even sounds were beautifully sad.  The happy progress of the war could not exorcise this soft, omnipotent melancholy.  Yet the progress of the war was nearly all that could be desired.  Verdun was held, and if Fort Vaux had been lost there had been compensation in the fact that the enemy, through the gesture of the Crown Prince in allowing the captured commander of the fort to retain his sword, had done something to rehabilitate themselves in the esteem of mankind.  Lord Kitchener was drowned, but the discovery had been announced that he was not indispensable; indeed, there were those who said that it was better thus.  The Easter Rebellion was well in hand; order was understood to reign in an Ireland hidden behind the black veil of the censorship.  The mighty naval battle of Jutland had quickly transformed itself from a defeat into a brilliant triumph.  The disturbing prices of food were about to be reduced by means of a committee.  In America the Republican forces were preparing to eject President Wilson in favour of another Hughes who could be counted upon to realise the world-destiny of the United States.  An economic conference was assembling in Paris with the object of cutting Germany off from the rest of the human race after the war.  And in eleven days the Russians had made prisoners of a hundred and fifty thousand Austrians, and Brusiloff had just said:  “This is only the beginning.”  Lastly the close prospect of the resistless Allied Western offensive which would deracinate Prussian militarism was uplifting men’s minds.

Christine walked nonchalantly and uninvitingly through the streets, quite unresponsive to the exhilaration of events.