CUPID AND PSYCHE.
In all the bright June weather, Christabel had been too busy and too
happy to remember her caprice about Cupid and Psyche. But just after the
Henley week--which to some thousands, and to these two lovers, had been
as a dream of bliss--a magical mixture of sunlight and balmy airs and
flowery meads, fine gowns and fine luncheons, nigger singers,
stone-breaking athletes, gipsy sorceresses, eager to read high fortunes
on any hand for half-a-crown, rowing men, racing men, artists, actors,
poets, critics, swells--just after the wild excitement of that watery
saturnalia, Mr. Hamleigh had occasion to go to the north of Scotland to
see an ancient kinswoman of his father--an eccentric maiden aunt--who
had stood for him, by proxy, at the baptismal font, and at the same time
announced her intention of leaving him her comfortable fortune,
together with all those snuff-mulls, quaighs, knives and forks, spoons,
and other curiosities of Caledonia, which had been in the family for
centuries--provided always that he grew up with a high opinion of Mary
Stuart, and religiously believed the casket letters to be the vile
forgeries of George Buchanan. The old lady, who was a kindly soul, with
a broad Scotch tongue, had an inconvenient habit of sending for her
nephew at odd times and seasons, when she imagined herself on the point
of death--and he was too kind to turn a deaf ear to this oft-repeated
cry of "wolf"--lest, after making light of her summons, he should hear
that the real wolf had come and devoured the harmless, affectionate old
lady.
So now, just when London life was at its gayest and brightest, when the
moonlit city after midnight looked like fairy-land, and the Thames
Embankment, with its long chain of glittering lamps, gleaming golden
above the sapphire river, was a scene to dream about, Mr. Hamleigh had
to order his portmanteau and a hansom, and drive from the Albany to one
of the great railway stations in the Euston Road, and to curl himself
up in his corner of the limited mail, scarcely to budge till he was
landed at Inverness. It was hard to leave Christabel, though it were
only for a week. He swore to her that his absence should not outlast a
week, unless the grisly wolf called Death did indeed claim his victim.
"I know I shall find the dear old soul up and hearty," he said, lightly,
"devouring Scotch collops, or haggis, or cock-a-leeky, or something
equally loathsome, and offering me some of that extraordinary soup which
she always talks of in the plural. 'Do have a few more broth, Angus;
they're very good the day.' But she is a sweet old woman, despite her
barbarities, and one of the happiest days of my life will be that on
which I take you to see her."
"And if--if she is not very ill, you will come back soon, won't you,
Angus," pleaded Christabel.
"As soon as ever I can tear myself away from the collops and the few
broth. If I find the dear old impostor in rude health, as I quite
expect, I will hob and nob with her over one glass of toddy, sleep one
night under her roof, and then across the Border as fast as the express
will carry me."
So they parted; and Angus had scarcely left Bolton Row an hour, when
Major Bree came in, and, by some random flight of fancy, Christabel
remembered "Cupid and Psyche."
The three ladies had just come upstairs after dinner. Mrs. Tregonell was
enjoying forty winks in a low capacious chair, near an open window, in
the first drawing-room, softly lit by shaded Carcel lamps, scented with
tea-roses and stephanotis. Christabel and Jessie were in the tiny third
room, where there was only the faint light of a pair of wax candles on
the mantelpiece. Here the Major found them, when he came creeping in
from the front room, where he had refrained from disturbing Mrs.
Tregonell.
"Auntie is asleep," said Christabel. "We must talk in subdued murmurs.
She looked sadly tired after Mrs. Dulcimer's garden party."
"I ought not to have come so early," apologized the Major.
"Yes you ought; we are very glad to have you. It is dreadfully dull
without Angus."
"What! you begin to miss him already?"
"Already!" echoed Christabel. "I missed him before the sound of his cab
wheels was out of the street. I have been missing him ever since."
"Poor little Belle!"
"And he is not half-way to Scotland yet," she sighed. "How long and slow
the hours will be. You must do all you can to amuse me. I shall want
distractions--dissipation even. If we were at home I should go and
wander up by Willapark, and talk to the gulls. Here there is nothing to
do. Another stupid garden party at Twickenham to-morrow, exactly
opposite the one to-day at Richmond--the only variety being that we
shall be on the north bank of the river instead of the south bank--a
prosy dinner in Regent's Park the day after. Let me see," said
Christabel, suddenly animated. "We are quite free for to-morrow evening.
We can go and see 'Cupid and Psyche,' and I can tell Angus all about it
when he comes back. Please get us a nice see-able box, like a dear
obliging Uncle Oliver, as you are."
"Of course I am obliging," groaned the Major, "but the most obliging
person that ever was can't perform impossibilities. If you want a box at
the Kaleidoscope you must engage one for to-morrow month--or to-morrow
six weeks. It is a mere bandbox of a theatre, and everybody in London
wants to see this farrago of nonsense illustrated by pretty women."
"You have seen it, I suppose."
"Yes, I dropped in one night with an old naval friend, who had taken a
stall for his wife, which she was not able to occupy."
"Major Bree, you are a very selfish person," said Christabel,
straightening her slim waist, and drawing herself up with mock dignity.
"You have seen this play yourself, and you are artful enough to tell us
it is not worth seeing, just to save yourself the trouble of hunting for
a box. Uncle Oliver, that is not chivalry. I used to think you were a
chivalrous person."
"Is there anything improper in the play?" asked Jessie, striking in with
her usual bluntness--never afraid to put her thoughts into speech. "Is
that your reason for not wishing Christabel to see it?"
"No, the piece is perfectly correct," stammered the Major, "there is not
a word----"
"Then I think Belle's whim ought to be indulged," said Jessie,
"especially as Mr. Hamleigh's absence makes her feel out of spirits."
The Major murmured something vague about the difficulty of getting
places with less than six weeks' notice, whereupon Christabel told him,
with a dignified air, that he need not trouble himself any further.
But a young lady who has plenty of money, and who has been accustomed,
while dutiful and obedient to her elders, to have her own way in all
essentials, is not so easily satisfied as the guileless Major supposed.
As soon as the West-end shops were open next morning, before the
jewellers had set out their dazzling wares--those diamond parures and
rivières, which are always inviting the casual lounger to step in and
buy them--those goodly chased claret jugs, and Queen Anne tea-kettles,
and mighty venison dishes, which seem to say, this is an age of luxury,
and we are indispensable to a gentleman's table--before those still more
attractive shops which deal in hundred-guinea dressing-cases, jasper
inkstands, ormolu paper-weights, lapis lazuli blotting-books, and coral
powder-boxes--had laid themselves out for the tempter's work--Miss
Courtenay and Miss Bridgeman, in their neat morning attire, were
tripping from library to library, in quest of a box at the Kaleidoscope
for that very evening.
They found what they wanted in Bond Street. Lady Somebody had sent back
her box by a footman, just ten minutes ago, on account of Lord
Somebody's attack of gout. The librarian could have sold it were it
fifty boxes, and at a fabulous price, but he virtuously accepted four
guineas, which gave him a premium of only one guinea for his
trouble--and Christabel went home rejoicing.
"It will be such fun to show the Major that we are cleverer than he,"
she said to Jessie.
Miss Bridgeman was thoughtful, and made no reply to this remark. She was
pondering the Major's conduct in this small matter, and it seemed to her
that he must have some hidden reason for wishing Christabel not to see
"Cupid and Psyche." That he, who had so faithfully waited upon all
their fancies, taking infinite trouble to give them pleasure, could in
this matter be disobliging or indifferent seemed hardly possible. There
must be a reason; and yet what reason could there be to taboo a piece
which the Major distinctly declared to be correct, and which all the
fashionable world went to see? "Perhaps there is something wrong with
the drainage of the theatre," Jessie thought, speculating vaguely--a
suspicion of typhoid fever, which the Major had shrunk from mentioning,
out of respect for feminine nerves.
"Did you ever tell Mr. Hamleigh you wanted to see 'Cupid and Psyche'?"
asked Miss Bridgeman at last, sorely exercised in spirit--fearful lest
Christabel was incurring some kind of peril by her persistence.
"Yes, I told him; but it was at a time when we had a good many
engagements, and I think he forgot all about it. Hardly like Angus, was
it, to forget one's wishes, when he is generally so eager to anticipate
them?"
"A strange coincidence!" thought Jessie. Mr. Hamleigh and the Major had
been unanimous in their neglect of this particular fancy of
Christabel's.
At luncheon Miss Courtenay told her aunt the whole story--how Major Bree
had been most disobliging, and how she had circumvented him.
"And my revenge will be to make him sit out 'Cupid and Psyche' for the
second time," she said, lightly, "for he must be our escort. You will
go, of course, dearest, to please me?"
"My pet, you know how the heat of a theatre always exhausts me!" pleaded
Mrs. Tregonell, whose health, long delicate, had been considerably
damaged by her duties as chaperon. "When you are going anywhere with
Angus, I like to be seen with you; but to-night, with the Major and
Jessie, I shall not be wanted. I can enjoy an evening's rest."
"But do you enjoy that long, blank evening, Auntie?" asked Christabel,
looking anxiously at her aunt's somewhat careworn face. People who have
one solitary care make so much of it, nurse and fondle it, as if it were
an only child. "Once or twice when we have let you have your own way
and stay at home, you have looked so pale and melancholy when we came
back, as if you had been brooding upon sad thoughts all the evening."
"Sad thoughts will come, Belle."
"They ought not to come to you, Auntie. What cause have you for
sadness?"
"I have a dear son far away, Belle--don't you think that is cause
enough?"
"A son who enjoys the wild sports of the West ever so much better than
he enjoys his home; but who will settle down by-and-by into a model
country Squire."
"I doubt that, Christabel. I don't think he will ever settle down--now."
There was an emphasis--an almost angry emphasis--upon the last word
which told Christabel only too plainly what her aunt meant. She could
guess what disappointment it was that her aunt sighed over in the long,
lonely evenings; and, albeit the latent resentfulness in Mrs.
Tregonell's mind was an injustice, her niece could not help being sorry
for her.
"Yes, dearest, he will--he will," she said, resolutely. "He will have
his fill of shooting bisons, and all manner of big and small game, out
yonder; and he will come home, and marry some good sweet girl, who will
love you only just a little less than I do, and he will be the last
grand example of the old-fashioned country Squire--a race fast dying
out; and he will be as much respected as if the power of the Norman
Botterells still ruled in the land, and he had the right of dealing out
high-handed justice, and immuring his fellow-creatures in a dungeon
under his drawing-room."
"I would rather you would not talk about him," answered the widow,
gloomily; "you turn everything into a joke. You forget that in my
uncertainty about his fate, every thought of him is fraught with pain."
Belle hung her head, and the meal ended in silence. After luncheon came
dressing, and then the drive to Twickenham, with Major Bree in
attendance. Christabel told him of her success as they drove through the
Park to Kensington.
"I have the pleasure to invite you to a seat in my box at the
Kaleidoscope this evening," she said.
"What box?"
"A box which Jessie and I secured this morning, before you had finished
your breakfast."
"A box for this evening?"
"For this evening."
"I wonder you care to go to a theatre without Hamleigh."
"It is very cruel of you to say that!" exclaimed Christabel, her eyes
brightening with girlish tears, which her pride checked before they
could fall. "You ought to know that I am wretched without him--and that
I want to lose the sense of my misery in dreamland. The theatre for me
is what opium was for Coleridge and De Quincey."
"I understand," said Major Bree; "'you are not merry, but you do beguile
the thing you are by seeming otherwise.'"
"You will go with us?"
"Of course, if Mrs. Tregonell does not object."
"I shall be very grateful to you for taking care of them," answered the
dowager languidly, as she leant back in her carriage--a fine example of
handsome middle-age: gracious, elegant, bearing every mark of good
birth, yet with a worn look, as of one for whom fading beauty and
decline of strength would come too swiftly. "I know I shall be tired to
death when we get back to town."
"I don't think London society suits you so well as the monotony of Mount
Royal," said Major Bree.
"No; but I am glad Christabel has had her first season. People have been
extremely kind. I never thought we should have so many invitations."
"You did not know that beauty is the ace of trumps in the game of
society."
The garden party was as other parties of the same genus: strawberry ices
and iced coffee in a tent under a spreading Spanish chestnut--music and
recitations in a drawing-room, with many windows looking upon the bright
swift river--and the picturesque roofs of Old Richmond--just that one
little picturesque group of bridge and old tiled-gables which still
remains--fine gowns, fine talk; a dash of the æsthetic element; strange
colours, strange forms and fashions; pretty girls in grandmother
bonnets; elderly women in limp Ophelia gowns, with tumbled frills and
lank hair. Christabel and the Major walked about the pretty garden, and
criticized all the eccentricities, she glad to keep aloof from her many
admirers--safe under the wing of a familiar friend.
"Five o'clock," she said; "that makes twenty-four hours. Do you think he
will be back to-morrow?"
"He? Might I ask whom you mean by that pronoun?"
"Angus. His telegram this morning said that his aunt was really ill--not
in any danger--but still quite an invalid, and that he would be obliged
to stay a little longer than he had hoped might be needful, in order to
cheer her. Do you think he will be able to come back to-morrow?"
"Hardly, I fear. Twenty-four hours would be a very short time for the
cheering process. I think you ought to allow him a week. Did you answer
his telegram?"
"Why, of course! I told him how miserable I was without him; but that
he must do whatever was right and kind for his aunt. I wrote him a long
letter before luncheon to the same effect. But, oh, I hope the dear old
lady will get well very quickly!"
"If usquebaugh can mend her, no doubt the recovery will be rapid,"
answered the Major, laughing. "I dare say that is why you are so anxious
for Hamleigh's return. You think if he stays in the North he may become
a confirmed toddy-drinker. By-the-by, when his return is so uncertain,
do you think it is quite safe for you to go to the theatre to-night? He
might come to Bolton Row during your absence."
"That is hardly possible," said Christabel. "But even if such a happy
thing should occur, he would come and join us at the Kaleidoscope."
This was the Major's last feeble and futile effort to prevent a wilful
woman having her own way. They rejoined Mrs. Tregonell, and went back to
their carriage almost immediately--were in Bolton Row in time for a
seven o'clock dinner, and were seated in the box at the Kaleidoscope a
few minutes after eight. The Kaleidoscope was one of the new theatres
which have been added to the attractions of London during the last
twenty years. It was a small house, and of exceeding elegance; the
inspiration of the architect thereof seemingly derived rather from the
_bonbonnières_ of Siraudin and Boissier than from the severer exemplars
of high art. Somebody said it was a theatre which looked as if it ought
to be filled with glacé chestnuts, or crystallized violets, rather than
with substantial flesh and blood. The draperies thereof were of palest
dove-coloured poplin and cream-white satin; the fauteuils were
upholstered in velvet of the same dove colour, with a monogram in dead
gold; the pilasters and mouldings were of the slenderest and most
delicate order--no heavy masses of gold or colour--all airy, light,
graceful; the sweeping curve of the auditorium was in itself a thing of
beauty: every fold of the voluminous dove-coloured curtain, lined with
crimson satin--which flashed among the dove tints here and there, like a
gleam of vivid colour in the breast of a tropical bird--was a study. The
front of the house was lighted with old-fashioned wax candles, a
recurrence to obsolete fashion which reminded the few survivors of the
D'Orsay period of Her Majesty's in the splendid days of Pasta and
Malibran, and which delighted the Court and Livery of the Tallow
Chandlers' Company.
"What a lovely theatre!" cried Christabel, looking round the house,
which was crowded with a brilliant audience; "and how cruel of you not
to bring us here! It is the prettiest theatre we have seen yet."
"Yes; it's a nice little place," said the Major, feebly; "but, you see,
they've been playing the same piece all the season--no variety."
"What did that matter, when we had not seen the piece? Besides, a young
man I danced with told me he had been to see it fifteen times."
"That young man was an ass!" grumbled the Major.
"Well, I can't help thinking so too," assented Christabel. And then the
overture began--a dreamy, classical compound, made up of reminiscences
of Mozart, Beethoven, and Weber--a melodious patchwork, dignified by
scientific orchestration. Christabel listened dreamily to the dreamy
music, thinking of Angus all the while--wondering what he was doing in
the far-away Scottish land, which she knew only from Sir Walter's
novels.
The dove-coloured curtains were drawn apart to a strain of plaintive
sweetness, and the play--half poem, half satire--began. The scene was a
palace garden, in some "unsuspected isle in far-off seas." The
personages were Psyche, her sisters, and the jealous goddess, whose rest
had been disturbed by rumours of an earthly beauty which surpassed her
own divine charms, and who approached the palace disguised as a crone,
dealing in philters and simples, ribbons and perfumes, a kind of female
Autolycus.
First came a dialogue between Venus and the elder sisters--handsome
women both, but of a coarse type of beauty, looking too large for the
frame in which they appeared. Christabel and Jessie enjoyed the
smartness of the dialogue, which sparkled with Aristophanian hits at the
follies of the hour, and yet had a poetical grace which seemed the very
flavour of the old Greek world.
At last, after the interest of the fable had fairly begun, there rose
the faint melodious breathings of a strange music within the palace--the
quaint and primitive harmonies of a three-stringed lyre--and Psyche came
slowly down the marble steps, a slender, gracious figure in classic
drapery--Canova's statue incarnate.
"Very pretty face," muttered the Major, looking at her through his
opera-glass; "but no figure."
The slim, willowy form, delicately and lightly moulded as a young
fawn's, was assuredly of a type widely different from the two young
women of the fleshly school who represented Psyche's jealous sisters. In
their case there seemed just enough mind to keep those sleek,
well-favoured bodies in motion. In Stella Mayne the soul, or, at any
rate, an ethereal essence, a vivid beauty of expression, an electric
brightness, which passes for the soul, so predominated over the sensual,
that it would have scarcely surprised one if this fragile
butterfly-creature had verily spread a pair of filmy wings and floated
away into space. The dark liquid eyes, the small chiselled features,
exquisitely Greek, were in most perfect harmony with the character.
Amongst the substantial sensuous forms of her companions this Psyche
moved like a being from the spirit world.
"Oh!" cried Christabel, almost with a gasp, "how perfectly lovely!"
"Yes; she's very pretty, isn't she?" muttered the Major, tugging at his
grey moustache, and glaring at the unconscious Psyche from his lurking
place at the back of the box.
"Pretty is not the word. She is the realization of a poem."
Jessie Bridgeman said nothing. She had looked straight from Psyche to
the Major, as he grunted out his acquiescence, and the troubled
expression of his face troubled her. It was plain to her all in a moment
that his objection to the Kaleidoscope Theatre was really an objection
to Psyche. Yet what harm could that lovely being on the stage, even were
she the worst and vilest of her sex, do to any one so remote from her
orbit as Christabel Courtenay?
The play went on. Psyche spoke her graceful lines with a perfect
intonation. Nature had in this case not been guilty of cruel
inconsistency. The actress's voice was as sweet as her face; every
movement was harmonious; every look lovely. She was not a startling
actress; nor was there any need of great acting in the part that had
been written for her. She was Psyche--the loved, the loving, pursued by
jealousy, persecuted by women's unwomanly hatred, afflicted,
despairing--yet loving always; beautiful in every phase of her gentle
life.
"Do you like the play?" asked the Major, grimly, when the curtain had
fallen on the first act.
"I never enjoyed anything so much! It is so different from all other
plays we have seen," said Christabel; "and Psyche--Miss Stella Mayne, is
she not--is the loveliest creature I ever saw in my life."
"You must allow a wide margin for stage make-up, paint and powder, and
darkened lashes," grumbled the Major.
"But I have been studying her face through my glass. It is hardly at all
made up. Just compare it with the faces of the two sisters, which are
like china plates, badly fired. Jessie, what are you dreaming about? You
haven't a particle of enthusiasm! Why don't you say something?"
"I don't want to be an echo," said Miss Bridgeman, curtly. "I could only
repeat what you are saying. I can't be original enough to say that Miss
Mayne is ugly."
"She is simply the loveliest creature we have seen on the stage or off
it," exclaimed Christabel, who was too rustic to want to know who Miss
Mayne was, and where the manager had discovered such a pearl, as a
London playgoer might have done.
"Hark!" said Jessie; "there's a knock at the door."
Christabel's heart began to beat violently. Could it be Angus? No, it
was more likely to be some officious person, offering ices.
It was neither; but a young man of the languid-elegant type--one of
Christabel's devoted admirers, the very youth who had told her of his
having seen "Cupid and Psyche," fifteen times.
"Why this makes the sixteenth time," she said, smiling at him as they
shook hands.
"I think it is nearer the twentieth," he replied; "it is quite the
jolliest piece in London! Don't you agree with me?"
"I think it is--remarkably--jolly!" answered Christabel, laughing. "What
odd words you have in London for the expression of your ideas--and so
few of them!"
"A kind of short-hand," said the Major, "arbitrary characters. Jolly
means anything you like--awful means anything you like. That kind of
language gives the widest scope for the exercise of the imagination."
"How is Mrs. Tregonell?" asked the youth, not being given to the
discussion of abstract questions, frivolous or solemn. He had a mind
which could only grasp life in the concrete--an intellect that required
to deal with actualities--people, coats, hats, boots, dinner,
park-hack--just as little children require actual counters to calculate
with.
He subsided into a chair behind Miss Courtenay, and, the box being a
large one, remained there for the rest of the play--to the despair of a
companion youth in the stalls, who looked up ever and anon, vacuous and
wondering, and who resembled his friend as closely as a well-matched
carriage-horse resembles his fellow--grooming and action precisely
similar.
"What brilliant diamonds!" said Christabel, noticing a collet necklace
which Psyche wore in the second act, and which was a good deal out of
harmony with her Greek drapery--not by any means resembling those simple
golden ornaments which patient Dr. Schliemann and his wife dug out of
the hill at Hissarlik. "But, of course, they are only stage jewels,"
continued Christabel; "yet they sparkle as brilliantly as diamonds of
the first water."
"Very odd, but so they do," muttered young FitzPelham, behind her
shoulder; and then, _sotto voce_ to the Major, he said--"that's the
worst of giving these women jewels, they _will_ wear them."
"And that emerald butterfly on her shoulder," pursued Christabel; "one
would suppose it were real."
"A real butterfly?"
"No, real emeralds."
"It belonged to the Empress of the French, and was sold for three
hundred and eighty guineas at Christie's," said FitzPelham; whereupon
Major Bree's substantial boot came down heavily on the youth's Queen
Anne shoe. "At least, the Empress had one like it," stammered
FitzPelham, saying to himself, in his own vernacular, that he had
"hoofed it."
"How do you like Stella Mayne?" he asked by-and-by, when the act was
over.
"I am charmed with her. She is the sweetest actress I ever saw; not the
greatest--there are two or three who far surpass her in genius; but
there is a sweetness--a fascination. I don't wonder she is the rage. I
only wonder Major Bree could have deprived me of the pleasure of seeing
her all this time."
"You could stand the piece a second time, couldn't you?"
"Certainly--or a third time. It is so poetical--it carries one into a
new world!"
"Pretty foot and ankle, hasn't she?" murmured FitzPelham--to which
frivolous comment Miss Courtenay made no reply.
Her soul was rapt in the scene before her--the mystic wood whither
Psyche had now wandered with her divine lover. The darkness of a summer
night in the Greek Archipelago--fire-flies flitting athwart ilex and
olive bushes--a glimpse of the distant starlit sea.
Here--goaded by her jealous sisters to a fatal curiosity--Psyche stole
with her lamp to the couch of her sleeping lover, gazing spell-bound
upon that godlike countenance--represented in actual flesh by a chubby
round face and round brown eyes--and in her glad surprise letting fall a
drop of oil from her lamp on Cupid's winged shoulder--whereon the god
leaves her, wounded by her want of faith. Had he not told her they must
meet only in the darkness, and that she must never seek to know his
name? So ends the second act of the fairy drama. In the third, poor
Psyche is in ignoble bondage--a slave to Venus, in the goddess's Palace
at Cythera--a fashionable, fine-lady Venus, who leads her gentle
handmaiden a sorry life, till the god of love comes to her rescue. And
here, in the tiring chamber of the goddess, the playwright makes sport
of all the arts by which modern beauty is manufactured. Here poor
Psyche--tearful, despairing--has to toil at the creation of the Queen of
Beauty, whose charms of face and figure are discovered to be all
falsehood, from the topmost curl of her toupet to the arched instep
under her jewelled buskin. Throughout this scene Psyche alternates
between smiles and tears; and then at the last Cupid appears--claims his
mistress, defies his mother, and the happy lovers, linked in each
other's arms, float skyward on a shaft of lime-light. And so the
graceful mythic drama ends--fanciful from the first line to the last,
gay and lightly touched as burlesque, yet with an element of poetry
which burlesque for the most part lacks.
Christabel's interest had been maintained throughout the performance.
"How extraordinarily silent you have been all the evening, Jessie!" she
said, as they were putting on their cloaks; "surely, you like the play!"
"I like it pretty well. It is rather thin, I think; but then, perhaps,
that is because I have 'Twelfth Night' still in my memory, as we heard
Mr. Brandram recite it last week at Willis's Rooms."
"Nobody expects modern comedy to be as good as Shakespeare," retorted
Christabel; "you might as well find fault with the electric light for
not being quite equal to the moon. Don't you admire that exquisite
creature?"
"Which of them?" asked Jessie, stolidly, buttoning her cloak.
"Which of them! Oh, Jessie, you have generally such good taste. Why,
Miss Mayne, of course. It is almost painful to look at the others. They
are such common earthy creatures, compared with her!"
"I have no doubt she is very wonderful--and she is the fashion, which
goes for a great deal," answered Miss Bridgeman; but never a word in
praise of Stella Mayne could Christabel extort from her. She--who,
educated by Shepherd's Bush and poverty, was much more advanced in
knowledge of evil than the maiden from beyond Tamar--suspected that some
sinister influence was to be feared in Stella Mayne. Why else had the
Major so doggedly opposed their visit to this particular theatre? Why
else did he look so glum when Stella Mayne was spoken about?