They made a brief, manful effort.  But the irrepressible outbursts from the audience bewildered them; every time Sir Lancelot du Lake the Child opened his mouth, the great, shadowy house fell into an uproar, and the children into confusion.  Strong women and brave girls in the audience went out into the lobby, shrieking and clinging to one another.  Others remained, rocking in their seats, helpless and spent.  The neighbourhood of Mrs. Schofield and Margaret became, tactfully, a desert.  Friends of the author went behind the scenes and encountered a hitherto unknown phase of Mrs. Lora Rewbush; they said, afterward, that she hardly seemed to know what she was doing.  She begged to be left alone somewhere with Penrod Schofield, for just a little while.

They led her away.

CHAPTER VI EVENING

The sun was setting behind the back fence (though at a considerable distance) as Penrod Schofield approached that fence and looked thoughtfully up at the top of it, apparently having in mind some purpose to climb up and sit there.  Debating this, he passed his fingers gently up and down the backs of his legs; and then something seemed to decide him not to sit anywhere.  He leaned against the fence, sighed profoundly, and gazed at Duke, his wistful dog.

The sigh was reminiscent:  episodes of simple pathos were passing before his inward eye.  About the most painful was the vision of lovely Marjorie Jones, weeping with rage as the Child Sir Lancelot was dragged, insatiate, from the prostrate and howling Child Sir Galahad, after an onslaught delivered the precise instant the curtain began to fall upon the demoralized “pageant.”  And then—­oh, pangs! oh, woman!—­she slapped at the ruffian’s cheek, as he was led past her by a resentful janitor; and turning, flung her arms round the Child Sir Galahad’s neck.

“Penrod Schofield, don’t you dare ever speak to me again as long as you live!” Maurice’s little white boots and gold tassels had done their work.

At home the late Child Sir Lancelot was consigned to a locked clothes-closet pending the arrival of his father.  Mr. Schofield came and, shortly after, there was put into practice an old patriarchal custom.  It is a custom of inconceivable antiquity:  probably primordial, certainly prehistoric, but still in vogue in some remaining citadels of the ancient simplicities of the Republic.

And now, therefore, in the dusk, Penrod leaned against the fence and sighed.

His case is comparable to that of an adult who could have survived a similar experience.  Looking back to the sawdust-box, fancy pictures this comparable adult a serious and inventive writer engaged in congenial literary activities in a private retreat.  We see this period marked by the creation of some of the most virile passages of a Work dealing exclusively in red corpuscles and huge primal impulses.  We see this thoughtful man dragged from his calm seclusion to a horrifying publicity; forced to adopt the stage and, himself a writer, compelled to exploit the repulsive sentiments of an author not only personally distasteful to him but whose whole method and school in belles lettres he despises.