with fitting respect; it had been good stuff once, but was past
its prime.

Jean polished off the family repast rapidly and hurried away to
the theatre. His only ideas as yet of what a play was like were
derived from the posters he had seen. He selected for tonight
one of the big theatres where a tragedy was on the bill. He took
his ticket for the pit with a vague idea it would be the talisman
admitting him to a new wonder-world of passion and emotion. Every
trifle is disconcerting to a troubled spirit, and on his entrance
he was surprised and sobered to see how few spectators there were
in the stalls and boxes. But at the first scraping of the violins
as the orchestra tuned up, he glued his eyes to the curtain,
which rose at last.

Then, then he saw, in a Roman palace, leaning on the back of a
chair of antique shape, a woman who wore over her robe of white
woollen the saffron-hued _palla_. Amid the trampling of feet, the
rustle of dresses and the shifting of stools, she was reciting
a long soliloquy, accompanied by slow, deliberate gestures. He
felt, as he gazed, a strange, unknown pleasure, that grew more
and more acute till it was almost pain. As scene followed scene,
there entered a confidante, then a hero, then a crowd of supers.
But he saw nothing but the apparition that had first fascinated
him. His eyes fastened greedily on her beauty, caressing the two
bare arms, encircled with rings of metal, gliding along the curve
of the hips below the high girdle, plunging amid the brown locks
that waved above the brow and were tied back with three white
fillets; they clung to the moving lips and the white, moist teeth
that ever and anon flashed in the glare of the footlights. He