"'There are many human needs, Gabriel, which it is criminal to gratify.' Burling went home in a four-wheeler. Cummerbridge had left after the first act—a severe attack of neuralgia in the right eye."
Elliot's full-throated laugh rang through the room. Heath was smiling, but almost sadly, Charmian thought.
"Perhaps it was My Little Darling which brought about the attempt at better things you were speaking of," he said to Mrs. Mansfield.
"Ah, but their prophet is not mine!" she answered.
An almost feverish look of vitality had come into her face, which was faintly pencilled by the fingers of sorrow.
"Sometimes I think I hate the disintegrating drama more than I despise the vulgar idiocies which, after all, never really touch human life," she continued. "No doubt it is sheer weakness on my part to be affected by it. But I am. Only last week Charmian and I saw the play that they—the superior ones—are all flocking to. The Premier has seen it five times already. I loathed its cleverness. I loathed the element of surprise in it. I laughed, and loathed my own laughter. The man who wrote it would put cap and bells on St. Francis of Assisi and make a mock of Œdipus."
She paused, then, leaning forward, in a low and thrilling voice she quoted, "'For we are in Thy hand; and man's noblest task is to help others by his best means and powers.'"
Claude Heath gazed at her while she was speaking, and in his eyes Charmian, glancing over her fan, saw what she thought of as two torches gleaming.
"I came out of the theater," continued Mrs. Mansfield, "and I confess it with shame, feeling as if I should never find again the incentive to a noble action, as if the world were turned to chaff. And yet I had laughed—how I had laughed!"
Suddenly she began to laugh at the mere recollection of something in the play.