But before Shelton had replied they reached the theatre, and their energies were spent in sidling to their stalls.  He had time to pass his neighbours in review before the play began.  Seated next to him was a lady with large healthy shoulders, displayed with splendid liberality; beyond her a husband, red-cheeked, with drooping, yellow-grey moustache and a bald head; beyond him again two men whom he had known at Eton.  One of them had a clean-shaved face, dark hair, and a weather-tanned complexion; his small mouth with its upper lip pushed out above the lower, his eyelids a little drooped over his watchful eyes, gave him a satirical and resolute expression.  “I’ve got hold of your tail, old fellow,” he seemed to say, as though he were always busy with the catching of some kind of fox.  The other’s goggling eyes rested on Shelton with a chaffing smile; his thick, sleek hair, brushed with water and parted in the middle, his neat moustache and admirable waistcoat, suggested the sort of dandyism that despises women.  From his recognition of these old schoolfellows Shelton turned to look at Halidome, who, having cleared his throat, was staring straight before him at the curtain.  Antonia’s words kept running in her lover’s head, “I don’t like unhealthy people.”  Well, all these people, anyway, were healthy; they looked as if they had defied the elements to endow them with a spark of anything but health.  Just then the curtain rose.

Slowly, unwillingly, for he was of a trustful disposition, Shelton recognised that this play was one of those masterpieces of the modern drama whose characters were drawn on the principle that men were made for morals rather than morals made by men, and he watched the play unfold with all its careful sandwiching of grave and gay.

A married woman anxious to be ridded of her husband was the pivot of the story, and a number of scenes, ingeniously contrived, with a hundred reasons why this desire was wrong and inexpedient, were revealed to Shelton’s eyes.  These reasons issued mainly from the mouth of a well-preserved old gentleman who seemed to play the part of a sort of Moral Salesman.  He turned to Halidome and whispered: 

“Can you stand that old woman?”

His friend fixed his fine eyes on him wonderingly.

“What old woman?”

“Why, the old ass with the platitudes!”

Halidome’s countenance grew cold, a little shocked, as though he had been assailed in person.

“Do you mean Pirbright?” he said.  “I think he’s ripping.”

Shelton turned to the play rebuffed; he felt guilty of a breach of manners, sitting as he was in one of his friend’s stalls, and he naturally set to work to watch the play more critically than ever.  Antonia’s words again recurred to him, “I don’t like unhealthy people,” and they seemed to throw a sudden light upon this play.  It was healthy!

The scene was a drawing-room, softly lighted by electric lamps, with a cat (Shelton could not decide whether she was real or not) asleep upon the mat.