The curtain went up, and this simple gesture on the part of the curtain evoked enormous applause.  The audience could not control the expression of its delight.  A young lady under a sunshade appeared; the mere fact of her existence threw the audience into a new ecstasy.  An old man with a red nose appeared:  similar demonstrations from the audience.  When these two had talked to each other and sung to each other, the applause was tripled, and when the scene changed from Piccadilly Circus at 4 a.m. to the interior of a Spanish palace inhabited by illustrious French actors and actresses who proceeded to play an act of a tragedy by Corneille, the applause was quintupled.  At the end of the tragedy the applause was decupled.  Then the Spanish palace dissolved into an Abyssinian harem, and Eliza Fiddle in Abyssinian costume was discovered lying upon two thousand cushions of two thousand colours, and the audience rose at Eliza and Eliza rose at the audience, and the resulting frenzy was the sublimest frenzy that ever shook a theatre.  The piece was stopped dead for three minutes while the audience and Eliza protested a mutual and unique passion.  From this point onwards Mr. Prohack lost his head.  He ran to and fro in the bewildering glittering maze of the piece, seeking for an explanation, for a sign-post, for a clue, for the slightest hint, and found nothing.  He had no alternative but to cling to Eliza Fiddle, and he clung to her desperately.  She was willing to be clung to.  She gave herself, not only to Mr. Prohack, but to every member of the audience separately; she gave herself in the completeness of all her manifestations.  The audience was rich in the possession of the whole of her individuality, which was a great deal.  She sang, danced, chattered, froze, melted, laughed, cried, flirted, kissed, kicked, cursed, and turned somersaults with the fury of a dervish, the languor of an odalisque, and the inexhaustibility of a hot-spring geyser....  And at length Mr. Prohack grew aware of a feeling within himself that was at war with the fresh, fine feeling of physical well-being.  “I have never seen a revue before,” he said in secret.  “Is it possible that I am bored?”

III

“Would you care to go behind and be introduced to Miss Fiddle?” Ozzie suggested at the interval after the curtain had been raised seventeen times in response to frantic shoutings, cheerings, thumpings and clappings, and the mighty tumult of exhilaration had subsided into a happy buzz that arose from all the seats in the entire orange-tinted brilliant auditorium.  The ladies would not go; the ladies feared, they said, to impose their company upon Miss Fiddle in the tremendous strain of her activities.  They spoke primly and decisively.  It was true that they feared; but their fear was based on consideration for themselves rather than on consideration for Miss Fiddle.  Ozzie was plainly snubbed.  He had offered a wonderful privilege, and it had been disdained.