Unknown to Jeanne, powerful influences had been at work. Her friend, the famous prima donna, enjoyed a large following. More than one morning she had seated herself at her telephone and had whispered words this way and that. The house had been sold out four days before the opening night. This had been glorious news.
“The best of the city will be here,” Solomon had said with a sober face. “One must remember, however, that the best are the most critical, too, and that their judgment is final. No curtain calls on the first night: good-bye, dear little light opera!”
What wonder then that Petite Jeanne’s fingers trembled as she toyed with a rose in her dressing room fifteen minutes before the lifting of the curtain on that night of nights!
“But I must be calm!” she told herself. “So much depends upon it: the success and happiness of all my Golden Circle! And with the success of this circle we may expand it. Merry shall enter it, and Tad, and perhaps others?
“I have only to be real, to be quite natural, to dance as I have danced by the garden walls of France; to say to that audience of rich and wise and beautiful people:
“‘See! I have for you something quite wonderful. It came from the past. Only the gypsies have seen it. Now I show it to you. And not alone I show it, but this sweet and good old dancer and all these, my chorus, so fresh and fair and young. Have you ever seen anything quite so enchanting? No. To be sure you have not!’”
Reassured by her own words, she rose to skip across the floor, then on down the vestibule toward the stage.
When the curtain rose on a scene of matchless beauty, a gypsy camp somewhere in France; when the beholders found themselves looking upon the gorgeous costumes, colorful tents, and gaudily painted vans clustered about a brightly glowing campfire; when the music, which might well have been the whispering of wind among the trees, began stealing through the house, a hush fell upon the place such as is seldom experienced save in the depths of a great forest by night.
When the little French girl, a frail wisp of humanity all done in red and gold, came spinning upon the stage to dance before the leering God whose very eyes appeared to gleam with hidden fire, the silence seemed to deepen.
All through that first act, not a sound was heard save those which came from the stage. Not a programme rustled, not a whisper escaped.