The play proceeded and Stephen did not move—­did not wince.  When Mrs. Halliday, whose mate was exacting, exclaimed, “The greatest apostle of expediency was St. Paul.  He preached ‘wives, love your husbands,’” he even permitted himself the ghost of a smile.  At one point he wished himself familiar with the plot; it was when Hamilton Bradley came jauntily on as Lord Ingleton, assuring Mrs. Halliday that immorality was really only shortsightedness.  Lady Dolly, in front, repeated Lord Ingleton’s phrase with ingenuous wonder.  “I know it’s clever,” she insisted, “but what does it mean?  Now that other thing—­what was it?—­’Subtract vice, and virtue is what is left’—­that’s an easy one.  Write it down on your cuff for me, will you, Colonel Cummins?  I shall be so sick if I forget it.”

Stephen was perhaps the only person in the box quite oblivious of Lady Dolly.  He looked steadily over her animated shoulders at the play, wholly involved in an effort which the author would doubtless have resented, to keep its current and direction through the floating debris of constrained sayings with which it was encumbered, to know in advance whither it was carrying its Mrs. Halliday, and how far Lord Ingleton would accompany.  When Lord Ingleton paused, as it were, to beg four people to “have nothing to do with sentiment—­it so often leads to conviction,” and the house murmured its amusement, Arnold shifted his shoulders impatiently.  “How inconsistent,” Lord Ingleton reproached Mrs. Halliday a moment later, “to wear gloves on your hands and let your thoughts go candid.”  Arnold turned to Duff.  “There’s no excuse for that,” he said, but Lindsay was hanging upon Hilda’s rejoinder and did not hear him.

At the end of the first act, where, after introducing Mrs. Halliday to her husband’s divorced first wife, Lord Ingleton is left rubbing his hands with gratification at having made two such clever women “aware of each other,” Stephen found himself absolutely unwilling to discuss the piece with the rest of the party.  As he left the box to walk up and down the corridor outside where it was cooler, he heard the voice of Colonel Cummins lifted in further quotation:  “’To be good and charming—­what a sinful superfluity!’ I’m sure nobody ever called you superfluous, Lady Dolly,” and was vividly aware of the advisability of taking himself and his Order out of the theatre.  He had not been gratified, or even from any point appealed to.  Hilda’s production of Mrs. Halliday was so perfect that it failed absolutely to touch him, almost to interest him.  He had no means of measuring or of valuing that kind of woman, the restless brilliant type that lives upon its emotions and tilts at the problems of its sex with a curious comfort in the joust.  He was too far from the circle of her modern influence to consider her with anything but impatience if he had met her original person, and her reflection, her reproduction, seemed to him frivolous and meaningless.  If he went then, however, he would go as he came, in so far as the play was concerned; the first act, relying altogether upon the jugglery of its dialogue, gave no clue to anything.  He owed it to Hilda, after all, to see the piece out.  It was only fair to give her a chance to make the best of it.  He decided that it was worth a personal sacrifice to give it her and went back.