during the
next interval. But as he was leading them into the wings the stage
manager passed.

"Just you find those hags Fernande and Maria!" cried Bordenave savagely.

Then calming down and endeavoring to assume the dignified expression
worn by "heavy fathers," he wiped his face with his pocket handkerchief
and added:

"I am now going to receive His Highness."

The curtain fell amid a long-drawn salvo of applause. Then across the
twilight stage, which was no longer lit up by the footlights, there
followed a disorderly retreat. Actors and supers and chorus made haste
to get back to their dressing rooms while the sceneshifters rapidly
changed the scenery. Simonne and Clarisse, however, had remained "at the
top," talking together in whispers. On the stage, in an interval between
their lines, they had just settled a little matter. Clarisse, after
viewing the thing in every light, found she preferred not to see La
Faloise, who could never decide to leave her for Gaga, and so Simonne
was simply to go and explain that a woman ought not to be palled up to
in that fashion! At last she agreed to undertake the mission.

Then Simonne, in her theatrical laundress's attire but with furs over
her shoulders, ran down the greasy steps of the narrow, winding stairs
which led between damp walls to the porter's lodge. This lodge, situated
between the actors' staircase and that of the management, was shut in
to right and left by large glass partitions and resembled a huge
transparent lantern in which two gas jets were flaring.

There was a set of pigeonholes in the place in which were piled letters
and newspapers, while on the table various bouquets lay awaiting their
recipients in close proximity to neglected heaps of dirty plates and
to an old pair of stays, the eyelets of which the portress was busy
mending. And in the middle of this untidy, ill-kept storeroom sat four
fashionable, white-gloved society men. They occupied as many ancient
straw-bottomed chairs and, with an expression at once patient and
submissive, kept sharply turning their heads in Mme Bron's direction
every time she came down from the theater overhead, for on such
occasions she was the bearer of replies. Indeed, she had but now
handed a note to a young man who had hurried out to open it beneath the
gaslight in the vestibule, where he had grown slightly pale on
reading the classic phrase--how often had others read it in that very
place!--"Impossible tonight, my d