interested Wayworth now, and he could never remember afterwards what
reasons Mr. Loder had enumerated. He liked, in the whole business of
discussion and preparation, even the things he had thought he should
probably dislike, and he revelled in those he had thought he should
like. He watched Miss Violet Grey that evening with eyes that sought
to penetrate her possibilities. She certainly had a few; they were
qualities of voice and face, qualities perhaps even of intelligence;
he sat there at any rate with a fostering, coaxing attention,
repeating over to himself as convincingly as he could that she was
not common--a circumstance all the more creditable as the part she
was playing seemed to him desperately so. He perceived that this was
why it pleased the audience; he divined that it was the part they
enjoyed rather than the actress. He had a private panic, wondering
how, if they liked THAT form, they could possibly like his. His form
had now become quite an ultimate idea to him. By the time the
evening was over some of Miss Violet Grey's features, several of the
turns of her head, a certain vibration of her voice, had taken their
place in the same category. She WAS interesting, she was
distinguished; at any rate he had accepted her: it came to the same
thing. But he left the theatre that night without speaking to her--
moved (a little even to his own mystification) by an odd
procrastinating impulse. On the morrow he was to read his three acts
to the company, and then he should have a good deal to say; what he
felt for the moment was a vague indisposition to commit himself.
Moreover he found a slight confusion of annoyance in the fact that
though he had been trying all the evening to look at Nona Vincent in
Violet Grey's person, what subsisted in his vision was simply Violet
Grey in Nona's. He didn't wish to see the actress so directly, or
even so simply as that; and it had been very fatiguing, the effort to
focus Nona both through the performer and through the "Legitimate."