But he parried this with his unfailing humour. "I guess I'm too sick to
risk that." He passed his hand through her arm with the conjugal gesture
familiar to Apex City. "Come along down to dinner, mother--I guess
Undine won't mind if I don't rig up to-night."



V

She had looked down at them, enviously, from the balcony--she had looked
up at them, reverentially, from the stalls; but now at last she was on a
line with them, among them, she was part of the sacred semicircle whose
privilege it is, between the acts, to make the mere public forget that
the curtain has fallen.

As she swept to the left-hand seat of their crimson niche, waving Mabel
Lipscomb to the opposite corner with a gesture learned during her
apprenticeship in the stalls, Undine felt that quickening of the
faculties that comes in the high moments of life. Her consciousness
seemed to take in at once the whole bright curve of the auditorium, from
the unbroken lines of spectators below her to the culminating blaze
of the central chandelier; and she herself was the core of that vast
illumination, the sentient throbbing surface which gathered all the
shafts of light into a centre.

It was almost a relief when, a moment later, the lights sank, the
curtain rose, and the focus of illumination was shifted. The music, the
scenery, and the movement on the stage, were like a rich mist tempering
the radiance that shot on her from every side, and giving her time to