First came a dialogue between Venus and the elder sisters—handsome women both, but of a coarse type of beauty, looking too large for the frame in which they appeared. Christabel and Jessie enjoyed the smartness of the dialogue, which sparkled with Aristophanian hits at the follies of the hour, and yet had a poetical grace which seemed the very flavour of the old Greek world.
At last, after the interest of the fable had fairly begun, there rose the faint melodious breathings of a strange music within the palace—the quaint and primitive harmonies of a three-stringed lyre—and Psyche came slowly down the marble steps, a slender, gracious figure in classic drapery—Canova's statue incarnate.
"Very pretty face," muttered the Major, looking at her through his opera-glass; "but no figure."
The slim, willowy form, delicately and lightly moulded as a young fawn's, was assuredly of a type widely different from the two young women of the fleshly school who represented Psyche's jealous sisters. In their case there seemed just enough mind to keep those sleek, well-favoured bodies in motion. In Stella Mayne the soul, or, at any rate, an ethereal essence, a vivid beauty of expression, an electric brightness, which passes for the soul, so predominated over the sensual, that it would have scarcely surprised one if this fragile butterfly-creature had verily spread a pair of filmy wings and floated away into space. The dark liquid eyes, the small chiselled features, exquisitely Greek, were in most perfect harmony with the character. Amongst the substantial sensuous forms of her companions this Psyche moved like a being from the spirit world.
"Oh!" cried Christabel, almost with a gasp, "how perfectly lovely!"
"Yes; she's very pretty, isn't she?" muttered the Major, tugging at his grey moustache, and glaring at the unconscious Psyche from his lurking place at the back of the box.
"Pretty is not the word. She is the realization of a poem."
Jessie Bridgeman said nothing. She had looked straight from Psyche to the Major, as he grunted out his acquiescence, and the troubled expression of his face troubled her. It was plain to her all in a moment that his objection to the Kaleidoscope Theatre was really an objection to Psyche. Yet what harm could that lovely being on the stage, even were she the worst and vilest of her sex, do to any one so remote from her orbit as Christabel Courtenay?
The play went on. Psyche spoke her graceful lines with a perfect intonation. Nature had in this case not been guilty of cruel inconsistency. The actress's voice was as sweet as her face; every movement was harmonious; every look lovely. She was not a startling actress; nor was there any need of great acting in the part that had been written for her. She was Psyche—the loved, the loving, pursued by jealousy, persecuted by women's unwomanly hatred, afflicted, despairing—yet loving always; beautiful in every phase of her gentle life.
"Do you like the play?" asked the Major, grimly, when the curtain had fallen on the first act.