Aunt Harriet, armour-plated with jewellery, made an exciting contrast with Lucy, whose blazing red-gold hair, large, rather puzzled eyes, and plain white dress, needed exotic surroundings to emphasise their true colour.
"You look very pretty, dear," said Aunt Harriet, who had made that evening a little money on the Stock Exchange, and was happy accordingly, "and quite excited, just as though you were expecting to see your Simon."
"I wish he could have arrived to-night instead of to-morrow," said Lucy.
But did she? As they drove through the streets scattered with star-dust, watched by a crimson moon, she sighed with that strange confusion of happiness and unhappiness that seemed always to be hers now. What was going to happen? Who was coming?... Only Simon?
She felt a return of her earlier breathless excitement as they pushed their way through the crowd in the lobby. "Stalls this way.... Downstairs to the stalls." "To your right, madam. Second on your right!" "Tickets, please ... tickets, please!"
Mrs. Comstock was a redoubtable general on these occasions, and pushed people aside with her sharp elbows, and flashed indignant glances with her fine eyes, and spread back her shoulders, and sparkled her rings....
Lucy wished that her aunt would not figure so prominently. She had perhaps never before disliked her so thoroughly as she did to-night. Then, out of the confusion and noise, there came peace. They were settling down into their seats, and on every side of them were space and light and colour, and a whispering murmur like the distant echo of the sea on Scarborough beach. Lucy was suddenly happy. Her eyes sparkled, her heart beat high. She looked about her and was pleasantly stirred by the size of the building. "Not so large as the Albert Hall," she had heard someone say. Why, then, how truly enormous the Albert Hall must be—and she thought suddenly, with a little kindly contempt, of Simon, and how very small he would seem placed in the middle of the stalls all by himself.
The musicians began to file into their seats; the lights turned up; the strangest discordances, like the voices of spirits in a lost world, filled the air; everywhere clumps of empty seats vanished ... people, people from the ceiling to the floor.... A little man stepped forward, stood upon his platform, bowed to the applause, held with uplifted baton a moment's silence, then released upon the air the accustomed harmonies of Ruy Blas.
To Lucy, who knew so little of life, that flooding melody of sound was the loveliest discovery. She sat back very straight, eyes staring, drinking it in, forgetting at once the lighted hall, her aunt, everything. Only Simon Laud persisted with her. It seemed as though to-night his figure refused to leave her.
He did not—oh! how instantly she knew it—fit in at all with the music. It was as though he were trying to draw her away from it, trying to persuade her that she did not really like it. He was interfering with her happiness, buzzing at her ear like an insect. She shook her head as though to drive this something away, and, even as she did so, she was aware that something else was happening to her.