The masque was an unimportant improvisation that Vickery had jingled off in hours of rest from the labor of his big play, “Clipped Wings.”
But it gained a mysterious charm from the setting. People were so used to seeing plays in artificial light among flat, hand-painted trees with leaves pasted on visible fishnets, that actual sunlight, genuine grass, and trees in three dimensions seemed poetically unreal and unknown.
The plot of the masque was not revolutionary.
Dorothy played a mother who quieted her four clamoring children with fairy-stories at bedtime; then they dreamed that a fairy queen visited them and transported them magically in their beds to fairyland.
At the height of the revel a rooster cock-a-doodle-did, the fairies scampered home, the children woke up to find themselves out in the woods in their nighties, and they skedaddled. Curtain.
The magic transformation scene did not work, of course. The ropes caught in the trees and Bret’s chauffeur and Gottlieb Hauf had to get a stepladder and fuss about, while the sleeping children sat up and the premature fairies peeked and snickered. Then the play went on.
Bret watched the performance with the indulgent contempt one feels for his unprofessional friends when they try to act. It puzzled him to see how bad Dorothy was.
All she had to do was to gather her family about her and talk them to sleep. Sheila had reminded her of this and pleaded:
“Just play yourself, my dear.”
But Dorothy had been as awkward and incorrigible as an overgrown girl.