arrow looked at his program, then, leaning toward Lissa, whispered: “That is the overture to Attitudes—the program explains it: ‘A series of pale gray notes’—what the deuce!—‘pale gray notes giving the value of the highest light in which the play is pitched’—” He paused, aghast.
“I understand,” whispered the girl, resting her lovely arm on the chair beside him. “Look! The curtain is rising! How my heart beats! Does yours?”
He nodded, unable to articulate.
The curtain rose very, very slowly, upon the first scene of Barnard Haw’s masterpiece of satire; and the lovely firing-line quivered, blue
batteries opening very wide, lips half parted in breathless anticipation. And about that time Harrow almost expired as a soft, impulsive hand closed nervously over his.
And there, upon the stage, the human species was delicately vivisected in one act; human frailty exposed, human motives detected, human desire quenched in all the brilliancy of perverted epigram and the scalpel analysis of the astigmatic. Life, love, and folly were portrayed with the remorseless accuracy of an eye doubly sensitive through the stimulus of an intellectual strabismus. Barnard Haw at his greatest! And how he dissected attitudes; the attitude assumed by the lover, the father, the wife, the daughter, the mother, the mistress—proving that virtue, per se, is a pose. Attitudes! How he flayed those who assumed them. His attitude toward attitudes was remorseless, uncompromising, inexorable.
And the curtain fell on the first act, its gray and silver folds swaying in the half-crazed whirlwind of applause.
Lissa’s silky hand trembled in Harrow’s, her grasp relaxed. He dropped his hand and, searching, encountered hers again.