What diversified people we like. This woman excites our admiration because she is beautiful, that one because she is clever, yon lady is sympathetic, and the trend of the mind of the fourth stimulates our own. They are absolutely dissimilar, that quartette, we like them all, and yet they have no points in common. It does us good to be with some people, they have an ennobling, refining, or softening effect upon us—it does us harm to be with others.
And so we are all many people in one. We adapt ourselves to our friends as we adapt our clothes to the weather. We expand in their sunshine and frizzle up in their sarcasm. We are all actors. All our life is merely human drama, and imperceptibly to ourselves we play many parts, and yet imagine during that long vista of years and circumstances we are always the same.
We act—you and I—but we act ourselves, and the professional player acts some one else; but that is the only difference, and it is less than most folk imagine.
Love of the stage is the fascination of the mysterious, which is the most insidious of all fascinations.
CHAPTER XIX
“CHORUS GIRL NUMBER II. ON THE LEFT”
A Fantasy Founded on Fact
Plain but Fascinating—The Swell in the Stalls—Overtures—Persistence—Introduction at Last—Her Story—His Kindness—Happiness crept in—Love—An Ecstasy of Joy—His Story—A Rude Awakening—The Result of Deception—The Injustice of Silence—Back to Town—Illness—Sleep.
THE curtain had just risen; the orchestra was playing the music of the famous operetta Penso, when a man in the prime of life in a handsome fur coat entered the stalls. He was alone. Having paid for his programme and taken off his furs, he quietly sat down to survey the scene.
The chorus was upon the stage; sweeping his glasses from end to end of the line of girls upon the boards, his eyes suddenly lighted upon the second girl on the left. She was not beautiful. She had a pretty figure, and a most expressive face; but her features were irregular and her mouth was large. Far more lovely girls stood in that row, many taller, with finely chiselled features and elegant figures, but only that girl—Number II. on the Left—caught and riveted his attention. He looked and looked again. What charm did she possess, he wondered, which seemed to draw him towards her? She was singing, and making little curtsies like the others in time to the music: she was waving her arms with those automatic gesticulations the chorus learn; she was smiling, and yet behind it all he seemed to see an unutterable sadness in the depths of her dark grey eyes. The girl fascinated him; he listened not to the music of Penso, he hardly looked at any one else; so long as Number II. on the Left remained upon the stage his entire thoughts were with her. She enchained, she almost seemed to hypnotise him, and yet she seldom looked his way. During the entr’acte Allan Murray went outside to try and discover the name of Number II. on the Left. No one, however, was able to tell him, or if they were, they would not.
Disappointed he returned to his seat in time for the second act. She had changed her dress, and the new one was perhaps less becoming than the first.