Harry’s box was exactly in the middle of the semi-circle of boxes which surround the balcony of the Regency Theatre.  They were ushered into it with the precautions of silence, for the three hundred and fifty-fifth performance of The Dolmenico Doll, the unique musical comedy from New York, had already commenced.  Leonora and Milly sat in front, and Harry drew up a chair so that he might whisper in their ears; he was very talkative.  Leonora could see nothing clearly at first.  Then gradually the crowded auditorium arranged itself in her mind.  She perceived the semi-circle of boxes, each exactly like their own, and each filled with women quite as elegantly gowned as she and Millicent, and men as dandiacal and correct as Harry; and in the balcony and in the stalls were serried regular rows of elaborate coiffures and shining bald heads; and all the seats seemed to be pervaded by the glitter of gems, the wing-like beating of fans, and the restless curving of arms.  She had not visited London for many years, and this multitudinous and wholesale opulence startled her.  Under other circumstances she would have enjoyed it intensely, and basked in it as a flower in the sunshine; to-night, however, she could not dismiss the image of Rose in the gaunt hospital in Lamb’s Conduit Street.  She knew the comparison was crude; she assured herself that there must always be rich and poor, idle and industrious, gay and sorrowful, elegant and shabby, arrogant and meek; but her discomfort none the less persisted, and she had the uneasy feeling that the whole of civilisation was wrong, and that Rose and the earnest ones were justified in their scorn of such as her.  And concurrently she dwelt upon Ethel and Fred at that hour, and listened with anxiety for the opening of the box-door and the entry of Arthur Twemlow.

She imagined that owing to their late arrival she must have missed the one essential clue to the plot of The Dolmenico Doll, and as the gorgeously decorated action was developed on the dazzling stage she tried in vain to grasp its significance.  The fall of the curtain came as a surprise to her.  The end of the first act had left her with nothing but a confused notion of the interior of a confectioner’s shop, and young men therein getting tipsy and stealing kisses, and marvellously pretty girls submitting to the robbery with a nonchalance born of three hundred and fifty four similar experiences; and old men grotesque in a dissolute senility; and sudden bursts of orchestral music, and simpering ballads, and comic refrains and crashing choruses; and lights, lingerie, picture-hats and short skirts; and over all, dominating all, the set, eternal, mechanical, bored smile of the pretty girls.

‘Awfully good, isn’t it?’ said Harry, when the generous applause had ceased.

‘It’s simply lovely,’ Milly agreed, fidgeting on her chair in juvenile rapture.

‘Yes,’ Leonora admitted.  And she indeed thought that parts of it were amusing and agreeable.