There is, to begin with, a certain magic about make-up which lends a color of plausibility to the paradoxical theory that our emotions spring from our facial expressions rather than the other way about.  Certainly to an experienced actor, his paint—­the mere act of putting it on and looking at himself in the glass as it is applied—­effects for him a solution of continuity between his real self, if you can call it that, and his part; so that fatigues, discouragements, quarrels, ailments—­I don’t mean to say are forgotten; they are remembered well enough, but are given the quality of belonging to some one else.  But beyond all that was the feeling, on the edge of this first performance, that they were now on their own.  Harold Mills and the composer, Goldsmith and Block, John Galbraith, had done their best, or their worst, as the case might be.  But their labors to-night would mean nothing to that rustling audience out in front.  From now on it was up to the company!

The appearance, back on the stage, of John Galbraith in evening dress, just as the call of the first act brought them trooping from their dressing-rooms, intensified this sensation.  He was going to be, to-night, simply one of the audience.

As a sample of the new spirit, Rose noted with hardly a sensation of surprise, that Patricia Devereux nodded amiably enough to Stewart Lester and observed that she believed the thing was going to go; and that Lester in reply said, yes, he believed it was.

Rose herself was completely dominated by it.  Her nerves—­slack, frayed, numb, an hour ago—­had sprung miraculously into tune.  She not only didn’t feel tired.  It seemed she never could feel tired again.  Not even, going back to her university days, on the eve of a class basket-ball game, or a tennis match, had she felt that fine thrill of buoyant confidence and adequacy quite so strongly!

It wasn’t until along in the third act that the audience became, for her, anything but a colloid mass—­something that you squeezed and thumped and worked as you did clay, to get into a properly plastic condition of receptivity, so that the jokes, the songs, the dances, even the spindling little shafts of romance that you shot out into it, could be felt to dig in and take hold.  It never occurred to her to think of it with a plural pronoun; it was “it” simply, an inchoate monster, which was, as the show progressed, delightfully loosening up, becoming good-humored, undiscriminating, stupidly infatuate; laughing at things no human being would consider funny, approving with a percussive roar things not in the least good; a monster, all the same, whose approbation gave you an intense, if quite unreasoning, pleasure.

But, along in the third act, as I said, as she came down to the footlights with the rest of the sextette in their All Alone number, one face detached itself suddenly from the pasty gray surface of them that spread over the auditorium; became human—­individual—­and intensely familiar.  Became the face, unmistakably, of Jimmy Wallace!