Page:The Relentless City.djvu/111

Rh Emsworth represented behaved quite never occurred to anyone. Her vitality dominated the situation.

Of all her audience, there was none so utterly surprised at the performance as Bilton. He knew her fairly well, but he had never seen in her half so clearly the triumph of temperament. Knowing her as he did, he knew it was not art; it was only an effort, unique and unsurpassable, to be herself. Again and again he longed to be a playwright; he could write her, he felt, could he write at all, a part that would be she. For never before had she so revealed herself a sunlit pagan. And as the play went on, his wonder increased. She was admirable. Then Mrs. Massington, who sat next him, laughed at something he had not seen, and for the moment he was vexed to have been called down from the stage to a woman less vivid, for his sensualism was of a rather high order.

Late that night, after the supper that followed the entertainment, he went upstairs. In Mon Repos there was no barbaric quenching of electric light at puritanical hours, no stranding of belated guests in strange passages, and he walked up from the smoking-room with his hands in his pockets, unimpeded by any guttering bedroom candle. The evening had been a triumph for Dorothy—in the mercantile way it had been as great a triumph for him, for the cachet of success at Mrs. Palmer's would certainly float the play in New York. The Gutter Snipe, he reflected, would have at least a column of virulent abuse, since it had been performed at Mon Repos. So much the better; he would have a whole procession of sandwich men, London fashion, parading Fifth Avenue, every alternate one bearing the most infamous extracts from that paper. To use abuse as a means of advertisement was a new idea it interested him. Certainly, Dorothy had been marvellous. She was a witch no one knew