"We dined with her first. She had, somehow, persuaded Burling, the Oxford historian, Mrs. Hartford, the dear poetess who never smiles, and her husband, and Cummerbridge, the statistician, to be of the party. After dinner where do you think she took us?"
"To the Oxford?" said Elliot, flinging his hands round his knee and beginning to smile.
"To front row stalls at the Criterion, where they were giving a knockabout farce called _My Little Darling_ in which a clergyman was put into a boiler, a guardsman hidden in a linen cupboard, and a penny novelette duchess was forced to retreat into a shower-bath in full activity. I confess that I laughed more than I had ever done in my life. I sat between Burling, who looked like a terrified hen, and Mr. Hartford, who was seriously attentive from beginning to end, and kept murmuring, 'Really! Really!' And I had the poetess's sibylline profile in full view. I was almost hysterical when it was over. As we were coming out Mr. Hartford said to his wife, 'Henrietta, I'm glad we came.' She rolled an eye on him and answered, with tears in the voice, 'Why?' 'It's a valuable lesson. We now know what the British public needs.' Her reply was worthy of her."
"'There are many human needs, Gabriel, which it is criminal to gratify.' Burling went home in a four-wheeler. Cummerbridge had left after the first act--a severe attack of neuralgia in the right eye."
Elliot's full-throated laugh rang through the room. Heath was smiling, but almost sadly, Charmian thought.
"Perhaps it was _My Little Darling_ which brought about the attempt at better things you were speaking of," he said to Mrs. Mansfield.
"Ah, but their prophet is not mine!" she answered.
An almost feverish look of vitality had come into her face, which was faintly pencilled by the fingers of sorrow.
"Sometimes I think I hate the disintegrating drama more than I despise the vulgar idiocies which, after all, never really touch human life," she continued. "No doubt it is sheer weakness on my part to be affected by it. But I am. Only last week Charmian and I saw the play that they--the superior ones--are all flocking to. The Premier has seen it five times already. I loathed its cleverness. I loathed the element of surprise in it. I laughed, and loathed my own laughter. The man who wrote it would put cap and bells on St. Francis of Assisi and make a mock of OEdipus."