“Don’t think a whale of a lot of that.  How about taking a sneak?” petitioned Kennicott.

“Oh, let’s try the next one, ‘How He Lied to Her Husband.’”

The Shaw conceit amused her, and perplexed Kennicott: 

“Strikes me it’s darn fresh.  Thought it would be racy.  Don’t know as I think much of a play where a husband actually claims he wants a fellow to make love to his wife.  No husband ever did that!  Shall we shake a leg?”

“I want to see this Yeats thing, ‘Land of Heart’s Desire.’  I used to love it in college.”  She was awake now, and urgent.  “I know you didn’t care so much for Yeats when I read him aloud to you, but you just see if you don’t adore him on the stage.”

Most of the cast were as unwieldy as oak chairs marching, and the setting was an arty arrangement of batik scarfs and heavy tables, but Maire Bruin was slim as Carol, and larger-eyed, and her voice was a morning bell.  In her, Carol lived, and on her lifting voice was transported from this sleepy small-town husband and all the rows of polite parents to the stilly loft of a thatched cottage where in a green dimness, beside a window caressed by linden branches, she bent over a chronicle of twilight women and the ancient gods.

“Well—­gosh—­nice kid played that girl—­good-looker,” said Kennicott.  “Want to stay for the last piece?  Heh?”

She shivered.  She did not answer.

The curtain was again drawn aside.  On the stage they saw nothing but long green curtains and a leather chair.  Two young men in brown robes like furniture-covers were gesturing vacuously and droning cryptic sentences full of repetitions.

It was Carol’s first hearing of Dunsany.  She sympathized with the restless Kennicott as he felt in his pocket for a cigar and unhappily put it back.

Without understanding when or how, without a tangible change in the stilted intoning of the stage-puppets, she was conscious of another time and place.

Stately and aloof among vainglorious tiring-maids, a queen in robes that murmured on the marble floor, she trod the gallery of a crumbling palace.  In the courtyard, elephants trumpeted, and swart men with beards dyed crimson stood with blood-stained hands folded upon their hilts, guarding the caravan from El Sharnak, the camels with Tyrian stuffs of topaz and cinnabar.  Beyond the turrets of the outer wall the jungle glared and shrieked, and the sun was furious above drenched orchids.  A youth came striding through the steel-bossed doors, the sword-bitten doors that were higher than ten tall men.  He was in flexible mail, and under the rim of his planished morion were amorous curls.  His hand was out to her; before she touched it she could feel its warmth——­

“Gosh all hemlock!  What the dickens is all this stuff about, Carrie?”

She was no Syrian queen.  She was Mrs. Dr. Kennicott.  She fell with a jolt into a whitewashed hall and sat looking at two scared girls and a young man in wrinkled tights.