The conductor, as pale as though he had seen a ghost, turned and bowed stiffly.  ‘Put that in your pipe and smoke it,’ his unrelaxing features said to the audience; and also:  ’If you have ever heard the thing better played in the Five Towns, be good enough to inform me where!’

There was a hesitation, the brief murmur of a hidden voice, and the curtains of the fit-up stage swung apart and disclosed the roseate environs of Castle Bunthorne, ornamented by those famous maidens who were dying for love of its aesthetic owner.  The audience made no attempt to grasp the situation of the characters until it had satisfactorily settled the private identity of each.  That done, it applied itself to the sympathetic comprehension of the feelings of a dozen young women who appeared to spend their whole existence in statuesque poses and plaintive but nonsensical lyricism.  It failed, honestly; and even when the action descended from song to banal dialogue, it was not reassured.  ‘Silly’ was the unspoken epithet on a hundred tongues, despite the delicate persuasion of the music, the virginal charm of the maidens, and the illuminated richness of costumes and scene.  The audience understood as little of the operatic convention as of the aestheticism caricatured in the roseate environs of Castle Bunthorne.  A number of people present had never been in a theatre, either for lack of opportunity or from a moral objection to theatres.  Many others, who seldom missed a melodrama at the Hanbridge Theatre Royal, avoided operas by virtue of the infallible instinct which caused them to recoil from anything exotic enough to disturb the calm of their lifelong mental lethargy.  As for the minority which was accustomed to opera, including the still smaller minority which had seen Patience itself, it assumed the right that evening critically to examine the convention anew, to reconsider it unintimidated by the crushing prestige of the Savoy or of D’Oyly Carte’s No. 1 Touring Company.  And for the most part it found in the convention small basis of common sense.

Then Patience appeared on the eminence.  She was a dairymaid, and she could not understand the philosophy prevalent in the roseate environs of Castle Bunthorne.  The audience hailed her with joy and relief.  The dairymaid and her costume were pretty in a familiar way which it could appreciate.  She was extremely young, adorably impudent, airy, tripping, and supple as a circus-rider.  She had marvellous confidence.  ’We are friends, are we not, you and I?’ her gestures seemed to say to the audience.  And with the utmost complacency she gazed at herself in the eyes of the audience as in a mirror.  Her opening song renewed the triumph of the overture.  It was recognisably a ballad, and depended on nothing external for its effectiveness.  It gave the bewildered listeners something to take hold of, and in return for this gift they acclaimed and continued to acclaim.  Milly glanced coolly at the conductor, who winked