ld," she ended,
smiling. "What harm can it do for me to talk to you?"

"It's perfectly heavenly of you----"

"Oh, do you think so? I wonder what father thinks"--turning to look;
then, resuming: "He generally makes us stop, but I am quite sure he
expected me to talk to you."

The lone note of a piano broke the thread of the sweetest, maddest
discourse Harrow had ever listened to; the girl's cheeks flushed and she
turned expectantly toward the curtained stage. Again the lone note,
thumped vigorously, sounded a staccato monotone.

"Precious--very precious," breathed the poet, closing his eyes in a sort
of fatty ecstasy.

VIII

[Illustration]

Harrow looked at his program, then, leaning toward Lissa, whispered:
"That is the overture to _Attitudes_--the program explains it: 'A series
of pale gray notes'--what the deuce!--'pale _gray_ notes giving the
value of the highest light in which the play is pitched'--" He paused,
aghast.

"I understand," whispered the girl, resting her lovely arm on the chair
beside him. "Look! The curtain is rising! _How_ my heart beats! Does
yours?"

He nodded, unable to articulate.

The curtain rose very, very slowly, upon the first scene of Barnard
Haw's masterpiece of satire; and the lovely firing-line quivered, blue
batteries opening very wide, lips half parted in breathless
anticipation. And about that time Harrow almost expired as a soft,
impulsive hand closed nervously over his.

And there, upon the stage, the human species was delicately vivisected
in one act; human frailty exposed, human motives detected, human desire
quenched in all the brilliancy of perverted epigram and the scalpel
analysis of the astigmatic. Life, love, and folly were portrayed with
the remorseless accuracy of an eye doubly sensitive through the stimulus
of an intellectual strabismus. Barnard Haw at his greatest! And how he
dissected attitudes; the attitude assumed by the lover, the father, the
wife, the daughter, the mother, the mistress--proving that virtue, _per
se_, is a pose. Attitudes! How he flayed those who assumed them. His
attitude toward attitudes was remorseless, uncompromising, inexorable.

And the curtain fell on the first act, its gray and silver folds swaying
in the half-crazed whirlwind of applause.

Lissa's silky hand trembled in Harrow's, her grasp relaxed. He dropped
his hand and, searching, encountered hers again.

"_What_ do you think of it?" she asked.

"I don't thin