Cleopatra that gave them the signal?  Or did Venus herself whisper in their ears that the time for their fête was come at length, that the paid vagaries of the stage demanded companionship, and that the audience, too, must move in great processions, whirl in demon circles, rise up in heart to the clash of cymbals, bow down before the goddesses of the night, the women who gave to modern men the modern heaven that they desire in our days?  The stage was a waving sea of scarlet, through which one white woman floated, like a sin with pale cheeks in the midst of the rubicund virtues.  She was, perhaps, not beautiful, but she was provocative and alluring, and her whiteness made her as voluptuous as innocence is when it moves through the habitations of the wicked.  Julian watched her come to Faust and win him from the scarlet dancers and from the arms of Cleopatra, and the strange rejuvenation of this philosopher who had been old, and known decaying faculties, and the flight of the heart from the warm closes of the summer to the white and iron winter plains, filled him with sympathy.  It must be easy to use your youth after you have known the enforced reserve of age.  For age is a bitter lesson.  The dance grew more wild and rattling.  The frou-frou of the swinging scarlet skirts filled the great house with sound as the glitter of spangles filled it with a shimmering light.  Faust was surrounded by fluttering women moving in complicated evolutions with a trained air of reckless devilry.  And Julian gave himself to the illusion created by the skill of Katti Lanner, ignoring entirely the real care of the dancers, and choosing to consider them as merely driven by wild impulse, vagrant desires of furious motion, and the dashing gaiety of keen sensual sensation.  They danced to fire a real Faust, and he was Faust for the moment.  His arm closed more firmly round the waist of Cuckoo, and he could feel the throbbing of her heart against the palm of his hand.  He did not look at her, and so he did not see the dawning anxiety with which she was beginning furtively to regard him.  Entirely engrossed with the stage spectacle, the movement of his arm had been entirely mechanical, prompted by the hardening pressure of excitement in his mind.  If he had actually crushed Cuckoo and hurt her he would have been unconscious that he was doing it.

And Valentine all this time leaned back in his chair, that stood in the shadow of the box, and looked at the enlaced figures before him with an unvarying smile.

Contrast and surprise are the essence of the successful “spectacle.”  Just as the scarlet dervish whirl was at its height the character of the music changed, slackened, softened, died from the angrily sensuous into an ethereal delicacy.  The stage filled with clouds that faded in golden light, and a huge and glittering stairway rose towards the painted sky.  On either side of it hung in the blue ether guardian angels with outstretched wings, and between