his real self, if you can call it that,
and his part; so that fatigues, discouragements, quarrels, ailments--I
don't mean to say are forgotten; they are remembered well enough, but
are given the quality of belonging to some one else. But beyond all that
was the feeling, on the edge of this first performance, that they were
now on their own. Harold Mills and the composer, Goldsmith and Block,
John Galbraith, had done their best, or their worst, as the case might
be. But their labors to-night would mean nothing to that rustling
audience out in front. From now on it was up to the company!

The appearance, back on the stage, of John Galbraith in evening dress,
just as the call of the first act brought them trooping from their
dressing-rooms, intensified this sensation. He was going to be,
to-night, simply one of the audience.

As a sample of the new spirit, Rose noted with hardly a sensation of
surprise, that Patricia Devereux nodded amiably enough to Stewart Lester
and observed that she believed the thing was going to go; and that
Lester in reply said, yes, he believed it was.

Rose herself was completely dominated by it. Her nerves--slack, frayed,
numb, an hour ago--had sprung miraculously into tune. She not only
didn't feel tired. It seemed she never could feel tired again. Not even,
going back to her university days, on the eve of a class basket-ball
game, or a tennis match, had she felt that fine thrill of buoyant
confidence and adequacy quite so strongly!

It wasn't until along in the third act that the audience became, for
her, anything but a colloid mass--something that you squeezed and
thumped and worked as you did clay, to get into a properly plastic
condition of receptivity, so that the jokes, the songs, the dances,
even the spindling little shafts of romance that you shot out into it,
could be felt to dig in and take hold. It never occurred to her to think
of it with a plural pronoun; it was "it" simply, an inchoate monster,
which was, as the show progressed, delightfully loosening up, becoming
good-humored, undiscriminating, stupidly infatuate; laughing at things
no human being would consider funny, approving with a percussive roar
things not in the least good; a monster, all the same, whose approbation
gave you an intense, if quite unreasoning, pleasure.

But, along in the third act, as I said, as she came down to the
footlights with the rest of the sextette in their _All Alone_ number,
one face detached