"Hideously inartistic," said one passer-by to another.
"Still she's handsome. I've seen her. One of these big women——"
Yes, it was inartistic. Reds and blues and greens in vivid splashes, and the name writ large. A marvellous jump from the bankrupt shifts of the Tragedy Company to this smiling elevation. And Barnaby was still ignorant. He had not been warned.
She thought of him now. The passionate shame that had caught her up like a flame sweeping all before it had died out. She felt only a kind of wonder at herself, looking back. It was inevitable. The impossible situation could only have ended so.... But in the background all the while was the woman.
She tried to shake off the lassitude of despair. Why had she burned the letter? She had been going to tell Barnaby, although the writer had forbidden her to share its contents with him. It would have been simpler to let him—but no, she could never have put that letter into his hands. Hard enough to look him in the face and tell him what she could repeat;—that the woman who was his wife, the one in whose likeness she had been masquerading, had written, and was in England. But before she had spoken Julia had intervened and the waters of bitterness had closed over her head.
Barnaby must not be left in the dark. She had a wild and sudden longing to do something for him still; one last service. She could find out from this woman what were her intentions towards him and if it were a threat or a promise that had lurked in that ambiguous letter.
She must ask somebody where she was. For the first time she realized her surroundings, the roar of the traffic, the restless street.
*****
Outside the theatre an interminable train of people, wedged tightly, endured with their faces turned towards the gallery stair; another line, reaching far down the pavement and less good-humoured, guarded the entrance to the pit. The lights falling on their faces threw up a singular likeness in expression, a kind of touch-me-not attitude that defied their physical juxtaposition. Squeezed like herrings, their pained endurance was heightened by the universal lack of a smile. And the lines were haunted by a street musician strumming his lamentable tune.
As Susan went up the dark entry she was pursued by unfriendly glances, the quick suspicion that she was a late comer who must be turned back ignominiously in her base attempt to push in at the head of the line. As she vanished inside the stage door there was an interested murmur; here and there a man unbent and asked his neighbour which of them she was. Then there was a click and the crowd went surging forward. The doors were open.