Stephen was aware, in the abstract, of what he might expect.  He savoured the enterprises of the London theatres weekly in the Saturday Review; he had cast a remotely observing eye upon the productions of this particular playwright through that medium for a long time.  They formed a manifestation of the outer world fit enough to draw a glance of speculation from the inner; their author was an acrobat of ideas.  Doubtless we are all clowns in the eyes of the angels, yet we have the habit of supposing that they sometimes look down upon us.  It was thus, if the parallel is not exaggerated, that Arnold regarded the author of The Victim of Virtue.  His attitude was quite taken before the orchestra ceased playing; it was made of negation rather than criticism, on the basis that he had no concern with, and no knowledge of, such things.  Deliberately he gave his mind a surface which should shed promiscuous invitation, and folded his lips as it were, against the rising of the curtain.  He thought of Hilda separately, and he looked for her upon the boards with the simplicity of a desire to see the woman he knew.

When finally he did see her she made before him a picture that was to remain with him always as his last impression of an art from which in all its manifestations on that night he definitely turned.  From the aigrette in her hair to the paste buckle on her shoe she was mondaine.  Her dress, of some indefinite, slight white material, clasped at the waist with a belt that gave the beam of turquoises and the gleam of silver, ministered as much to the capricious ideal of the moment as to the lines and curves of the person it adorned.  The set was the inevitable modern drawing-room, and she sat well out on a sofa, with her hands, in long black gloves, resting stiffly, palm downward on each side of her.  It was as if she pushed her body forward in an impulse to rise, her rigid arms thrust her shoulders up a little and accentuated the swell of her bosom.  It was a vivid, a staccato attitude; it expressed a temperament, a character, fifty other things; but especially it epitomised the restraints and the licenses of a world of drawing-rooms.  In that first brief mute instant of disclosure she was all that she presently, by voice and movement, proclaimed herself to be—­so dazzling and complete that Stephen literally blinked at the revelation.  He made an effort, for a moment or two, to pursue and detect the woman who had been his friend; then the purpose of his coming gradually faded from his mind, and he stood with folded arms and absorbed eyes watching the other, the Mrs. Halliday, on the sofa, setting about the fulfilment of a purple destiny.