In ten minutes the whole attention of the house was engrossed, after the first quarter of an hour the audience was perfectly still.
But this was curious. Throughout the whole of the first act there was hardly any applause—until the fall of the curtain. What little clapping of hands there was came from the huge upper circle, which combined in itself the functions of pit, upper circle, and gallery in the Park Lane Theatre.
But it was not a chilling silence; it was by no means the silence of indifference, of boredom. It was a silence of astonishment at the daring of the play. It was also a silence of wonder at, and appreciation of, the supreme talent of the writer, and the players who interpreted him.
There were many Socialists in the house, more especially in the upper tiers, but these were in a large minority.
Rose and Flood had allowed but few tickets to be sold to the libraries and theatre agents for the first three nights.
They had laid their plans well; they wanted Society to see the play before other classes of the community did so.
The "boom" which had been worked up in the general Press of London, more especially owing to the skilful direction of it by that astute editor, Mr. Goodrick, of the Daily Wire, had been quite sufficient to ensure an enormous demand for seats.
The manager of the box office had his instructions, and as a result the theatre was crammed with people to whom socialistic doctrines were anathema, and who sat angry at the doctrine which was being pumped into their brains from the other side of the footlights, but spellbound by the genius that was doing it.
Yet the plot of the play was quite simple. It seemed fresh and new because of the subtlety of its treatment, yet, nevertheless, it was but a peg on which to hang an object lesson.
Mary, the heroine, represented a woman of the wealthy class which controls the "high finance." Her late husband had left her millions. As a girl she was brought up in the usual life of her class, shielded from all true knowledge of human want, the younger daughter of an earl, married at twenty to a gentlemanly high priest of the god Mammon, who had died five years after the marriage, leaving her with one child, a boy, and mistress of his vast fortune. At the period when the play opened she was engaged to the young Marquis of Wigan, a peer, also immensely wealthy. She was deeply in love with him—real love had come to her for the first time in her life—and he adored her. They were soon to be married. They lived in a rosy dream. They knew nothing of the outside world.