“Nothing.”
“You do not look as if you were enjoying yourself.”
“To be truthful with you, I am not.”
“This play displeases you?”
“Oh, how could it please me?”
“But there is nothing but enthusiasm in the lobby between the acts. Every one is delighted with it,” I argued.
“I do not share every one’s opinion. You must excuse me.”
How often our dialogue ran like that! The drama or the comedy changed, but our words were usually the same. I can still see her mechanical gesture. Before us, on the stage, a woman would torment and harass her husband with her sensual love; another, virtuous all her life to that time, surrender at last to an unknown blackguard; a third stole money to buy beautiful gowns in which to excite her husband’s waning desire for her; all, shedding an odour of the alcove upon the audience, represented to us as heroines of love; and upon that basis applauded frantically by the public, its nerves shaken.
“They love; that is all,” was the general comment all about us.
Raymonde shook her head, as if that were not all. One evening, aroused by the general acclamation, unable to resist that magnetic current which comes from an electrified crowd, I insisted on sustaining the popular theories regarding a play in which the heroine, a young girl, gave herself up in a burst of passion to her sister’s husband.