After this the play ran its smooth course, and the audience settled into its accustomed humour of sympathetic attention.
In spite of the novelty of this, her first view of a theatre, the President fascinated Margaret. She watched the changing lights and shadows of his sensitive face with untiring interest, and the wonder of his life grew upon her imagination. This man who was the idol of the North and yet to her so purely Southern, who had come out of the West and yet was greater than the West or the North, and yet always supremely human—this man who sprang to his feet from the chair of State and bowed to a sorrowing woman with the deference of a knight, every man’s friend, good-natured, sensible, masterful and clear in intellect, strong, yet modest, kind and gentle—yes, he was more interesting than all the drama and romance of the stage!
He held her imagination in a spell. Elsie, divining her abstraction, looked toward the President’s box and saw approaching it along the balcony aisle the figure of John Wilkes Booth.
“Look,” she cried, touching Margaret’s arm. “There’s John Wilkes Booth, the actor! Isn’t he handsome? They say he’s in love with my chum, a senator’s daughter whose father hates Mr. Lincoln with perfect fury.”
“He is handsome,” Margaret answered. “But I’d be afraid of him, with that raven hair and eyes shining like something wild.”
“They say he is wild and dissipated, yet half the silly girls in town are in love with him. He’s as vain as a peacock.”
Booth, accustomed to free access to the theatre, paused near the entrance to the box and looked deliberately over the great crowd, his magnetic face flushed with deep emotion, while his fiery inspiring eyes glittered with excitement.
Dressed in a suit of black broadcloth of faultless fit, from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet he was physically without blemish. A figure of perfect symmetry and proportion, his dark eyes flashing, his marble forehead crowned with curling black hair, agility and grace stamped on every line of his being—beyond a doubt he was the handsomest man in America. A flutter of feminine excitement rippled the surface of the crowd in the balcony as his well-known figure caught the wandering eyes of the women.
He turned and entered the door leading to the President’s box, and Margaret once more gave her attention to the stage.
Hawk, as Dundreary, was speaking his lines and looking directly at the President instead of at the audience: