"I wouldn't mind its being disgusting so much," said one of her friends; "but what I can't stand is that it is so uninteresting. There's no meaning. It doesn't mean anything. It has no criticism of life."
"They say he's killing himself with chloral," said the third woman.
At the entrance to the smoke-room, they were stopped by the crowd. A lady with fine eyes fanned herself vigorously on the arm of her escort.
"It's very interestin'," she said; "but, of course, it isn't a play."
"No. It's not a play," said her friend. After a pause, he defined his critical position. "Y'know, I don't believe in all this talk about Ibsen and that. I like a play to be a play."
The smoke-room was full of men with cigarettes. Nearly all had a look of the theatre about them, something clean-shaven, something in the eye, in the fatness of the lower jaw, and in the general exaggeration of the bearing. Something loud and unreal. The pretty girls at the bar were busy, expending the same smile, and the same charm of manner, on each customer, and dismissing him, when served, with an indifference which was like erasure. The friends lighted fresh cigarettes and shared a bottle of Perrier water. The pretty, weary-faced waitress looked at Roger intently, with interested sympathy. She had seen the dress-rehearsal, she was one of his admirers.
Matches scratched and spluttered; soda-water bubbled into spirits; the cork extractors squeaked and thumped, with a noise of fizzing. A pale, white-haired man, with an amber cigarette-holder nine inches long, evidently his only claim to distinction, held a glass at an angle, dispensing criticism.
"It's all damned tommy-rot," he said. "All this tosh these young fellers write. It's what I call German measles. Now we've got a drama. You may say what you like about these Scandinavian people, and Hauptmann, and what's the name of the French feller, who wrote the book about wasps? They're all. You know what I mean. Every one of them. Like the pre-Raphaelites were; but put them beside our English dramatists; where are they?"
Some one with an Irish voice maintained in a lull, rather brilliantly, that Shakespeare had no intellect, but that Coriolanus showed a genuine feeling for the stage.
A friend without definite contradiction offered, in amendment, that: "None of the Elizabethans were any good at all; Coriolanus was a Latin exercise. English drama dated from 1893."