Eventually—­that is, five minutes before the curtain rose—­the representatives of the leading Calcutta journals decided that they were justified in describing the house as a large and fashionable audience.  The Viceroy had taken a box, and sent an Aide-de-Camp to sit in it, also a pair of M.P.’s from the North of England, whom he was expected to attend to in Calcutta, and the governess.  The Commander-in-Chief had not been solicited to be present, the theatrical season demanding an economy in such personalities if they were to go round; but a Judge of the High Court had a party in the front row, and a Secretary to the Bengal Government sat behind him.  To speak of unofficials, there must have been quite forty lakhs of tea and jute and indigo in the house, very genial and prosperous, to say nothing of hides and seeds, and the men who sold money and bought diamonds with the profits, which shone in their wives’ hair.  A duskiness prevailed in the bare arms and shoulders; much of the hair was shining and abundant, and very black.  A turn of the head showed a lean Greek profile, an outline bulbous and Armenian, the smooth creamy mask of a Jewess, while here and there glimmered something more opulent and inviting still, which proclaimed, if it did not confess, the remote motherhood of the zenana and the origin of the sun.  An audience of fluttering fans and wrinkled shirt collars—­the evening was warm under the gas-lights—­sensuous, indolent, already amused with itself.  Not an old woman in it from end to end, hardly a man turned fifty, and those who were had the air and looked to have the habits of twenty-five—­ an audience that might have got up and stretched itself but for good manners, and walked out in childish boredom at having to wait for the rise of the curtain, but sat on instead, diffusing an atmosphere of affluence and delicate scents, and suggesting, with imperious chins, the use of quick orders in a world of personal superiority.

Thus the stalls—­they were spindling cane-bottomed chairs—­and the boxes, in one of which the same spindling cane-bottomed chairs supported, in more expensive seclusion, Surgeon-Major and Miss Livingstone, the Reverend Stephen Arnold, and two or three other people.  The Duke’s Own sat under the gallery, cheek by jowl with all the flotsam and jetsam of an Eastern port, well on the look-out for offensive personalities from the men of the ships, and spitting freely.  Here, too, was an ease of shoulder and a freedom from the cares of life—­at a venture the wives were taking in washing in Brixton, and the children sent to Board School at the expense of the nation.  And in a climate like this it was a popular opinion that a man must either enjoy himself or commit suicide.

The Sphinx on the crooked curtain looked above and beyond them all.  It was a caricature of the Sphinx, but could not confine her gaze.