“Hadn’t he kept him from marrying ...”  Emmy looked conscious for a moment.  “Marrying the right girl?  I didn’t understand it either.  It’s only a play.”

“Of course,” Alf agreed.  “See how that girl’s eyes shone when old fur-coat went after her?  Fair shone, they did.  Like lamps.  They’d got the limes on her...  You couldn’t see them.  My—­er—­my friend’s the electrician here.  He says it drives him nearly crazy, the way he has to follow her about in the third act.  She... she’s got some pluck, he says; the way she fights three of them single-handed.  They’ve all got revolvers.  She’s got one; but it’s not loaded.  Lights a cigarette, too, with them all watching her, ready to rush at her.”

“There!” said Emmy, admiringly.  She was thinking:  “It’s only a play.”

“She gets hold of his fur coat, and puts it on....  Imitates his voice....  You can see it’s her all the time, you know.  So could they, if they looked a bit nearer.  However, they don’t....  I suppose there wouldn’t be any play if they did....”

Emmy was not listening to him:  she was dreaming.  She was as gauche and simple in his company as a young girl would have been; but her mind was different.  It was practical in its dreams, and they had their disturbing unhappiness, as well, from the greater poignancy of her desire.  She was not a young girl, to be agreeably fluttered and to pass on to the next admirer without a qualm.  She loved him, blindly but painfully; without the ease of young love, but with all the sickness of first love.  And she had jealousy, the feeling that she was not his first object, to poison her feelings.  She could not think of Jenny without tremors of anger.  And still, for pain, her thoughts went throbbing on about Jenny whenever, in happiness, she had seen a home and Alf and a baby and the other plain clear consequences of earning his love—­of taking him from Jenny.

And then the curtain rose, the darkness fell, and the orchestra’s tune slithered into nothing.  The play went on, about the crook and the general and the millionaire and the heroine and all their curiously simple-minded friends.  And every moment something happened upon the stage, from fights to thefts, from kisses (which those in the gallery, not wholly absorbed by the play, generously augmented) to telephone calls, plots, speeches (many speeches, of irreproachable moral tone), shoutings, and sudden wild appeals to the delighted occupants of the gallery.  And Emmy sat through it hardly heeding the uncommon events, aware of them as she would have been aware of distant shouting.  Her attention was preoccupied with other matters.  She had her own thoughts, serious enough in themselves.  Above all, she was enjoying the thought that she was with Alf, and that their arms were touching; and she was wondering if he knew that.

iv