"Oh!" cried Christabel, almost with a gasp, "how perfectly lovely!"
"Yes; she's very pretty, isn't she?" muttered the Major, tugging at his grey moustache, and glaring at the unconscious Psyche from his lurking place at the back of the box.
"Pretty is not the word. She is the realization of a poem."
Jessie Bridgeman said nothing. She had looked straight from Psyche to the Major, as he grunted out his acquiescence, and the troubled expression of his face troubled her. It was plain to her all in a moment that his objection to the Kaleidoscope Theatre was really an objection to Psyche. Yet what harm could that lovely being on the stage, even were she the worst and vilest of her sex, do to any one so remote from her orbit as Christabel Courtenay?
The play went on. Psyche spoke her graceful lines with a perfect intonation. Nature had in this case not been guilty of cruel inconsistency. The actress's voice was as sweet as her face; every movement was harmonious; every look lovely. She was not a startling actress; nor was there any need of great acting in the part that had been written for her. She was Psyche--the loved, the loving, pursued by jealousy, persecuted by women's unwomanly hatred, afflicted, despairing--yet loving always; beautiful in every phase of her gentle life.
"Do you like the play?" asked the Major, grimly, when the curtain had fallen on the first act.
"I never enjoyed anything so much! It is so different from all other plays we have seen," said Christabel; "and Psyche--Miss Stella Mayne, is she not--is the loveliest creature I ever saw in my life."
"You must allow a wide margin for stage make-up, paint and powder, and darkened lashes," grumbled the Major.
"But I have been studying her face through my glass. It is hardly at all made up. Just compare it with the faces of the two sisters, which are like china plates, badly fired. Jessie, what are you dreaming about? You haven't a particle of enthusiasm! Why don't you say something?"
"I don't want to be an echo," said Miss Bridgeman, curtly. "I could only repeat what you are saying. I can't be original enough to say that Miss Mayne is ugly."
"She is simply the loveliest creature we have seen on the stage or off it," exclaimed Christabel, who was too rustic to want to know who Miss Mayne was, and where the manager had discovered such a pearl, as a London playgoer might have done.
