"There's the end of the act, madam," the young woman remarked at last encouragingly.
"All right," Poppy answered. "Go straight away and bring the gentleman here to me. I'm in a hurry. I want to get home."
The glass doors of the exits swished back and forth, letting out the confused stir and murmur of the house, letting out a crowd of men as well. And the aspect the said crowd presented to Poppy's overstrained nerves and exalted sensibility was repulsive. For it suggested to her a flight of gigantic black locusts, strong-jawed, pink-faced, and white-breasted, driven forth by a common hunger, rather cruelly active and intent. Her sense of humour was in abeyance, as was her usually triumphant common sense; so that her thought, going behind appearances and the sane interpretation of them, declined to that fundamental region in which the root laws of animal life become hideously bare and distinct. Out of the deep places of her own womanhood a hatred towards this crowd of men arose; that secular enmity which exists between the sexes asserting itself and, for the time being, obscuring both reason and justice. For upon what, as she asked herself bitterly, when all is said and done, do these male human locusts pasture, save on the souls and bodies of women, finding a garden before them, and, too often, leaving but a desert behind? Sex as sex became abhorrent to her, its penalties unpardonable, its pleasures as loathsome as its sins.
But from the black-coated throng the trim figure of the box-keeper just then detached itself; and a moment later Poppy, looking up, beheld Dominic Iglesias standing before her.
CHAPTER XX
"You sent for me, so I have come," Iglesias said, for Poppy St. John, usually so voluble, just now appeared speechless.
From the moment he had become aware of her presence in the theatre, Dominic had been sensible that she presented herself under a new aspect. Of the many different Poppys he had seen, this was by far the most powerful and dramatic. She stood out from the rest of the audience as some splendid tropic flower stands out from a thick-set mass of foliage, conspicuous in form and colour and in promise. There were handsome women, smart women, beautifully dressed women in plenty, but Poppy did not shade in with all these, making but part of a general effect. She remained unique, solitary; and this not merely on account of her vivid raiment. The effect of her told upon the mind quite as much as upon the sight. Yet she did not look out of place. She looked, indeed, preeminently at home. Out of doors, in the country sunshine, she had struck Dominic as a slight creature, unreal and fictitious. Here, amid highly artificial and conventional surroundings, she seemed to him the most natural and vital being present, retaining the completeness of her individuality, the energy and mystery of it alike, almost aggressively evident and untouched. Iglesias ceased to consider her in relation to his and her broken friendship, or in relation to that which he so reluctantly divined of her private life. He contemplated her in herself, finding an element of things primitive in her, which commanded his admiration, though it failed, so far, to touch his heart. And if this was the impression he received seeing her at a comparative distance, that impression was greatly intensified seeing her now at close quarters. The contrast between the subtle softness and the flare—as of a conflagration—of her dress, the weariness of her attitude, and the unfathomable melancholy of her eyes, stirred him profoundly.
"Yes," she answered quietly, almost coldly, "I know I sent. This was about the last place I should have expected to run across you. I flattered myself I was safe enough here. I didn't wish to meet you one little bit. Still, when I did see you, I wanted you. You're the most plaguey impossible person to rid oneself of somehow"—her voice and manner softened a little—"so I sent for you. I don't know why, because now I've got you I seem to have changed my mind. I have nothing to say."
"I can easily go," Iglesias remarked gravely.