Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/390

THE BETTER SORT was poor Mortimer Marshal, undeterred, undismayed, unperceiving, so hungry to be paragraphed in something like the same fashion and published on something like the same scale, that, for the very blindness of it, he couldn't read the lesson that was in the air, and scrambled, to his utmost, toward the boat itself that ferried the warning ghost. Just that, beyond everything, was the incoherence that made for rather dismal farce, and on which Bight had put his ringer in naming the author of Corisanda as a candidate, in turn, for the comic, the tragic vacancy. It was a wonderful moment for such an ideal, and the sight was not really to pass from her till she had seen the whole of the wonder. A fortnight had elapsed since the night of Beadel's disappearance, and the conditions attending the afternoon performances of the Finnish drama had in some degree reproduced themselves—to the extent, that is, of the place, the time and several of the actors involved; the audience, for reasons traceable, being differently composed. A lady of "high social position," desirous still further to elevate that character by the obvious aid of the theatre, had engaged a playhouse for a series of occasions on which she was to affront in person whatever volume of attention she might succeed in collecting. Her success had not immediately been great, and by the third or the fourth day the public consciousness was so markedly astray that the means taken to recover it penetrated, in the shape of a complimentary ticket, even to our young woman. Maud had communicated with Bight, who could be sure of a ticket, proposing to him that they should go together and offering to await him in the porch of the theatre. He joined her there, but with so queer a face—for her subtlety—that she paused before him, previous to their going in, with a straight "You know something!"

"About that rank idiot?" He shook his head, looking kind enough; but it didn't make him, she felt, more natural. "My dear, it's all beyond me." 378