She knew the life. She had foregone the traditional duties—marriage, home-building, motherhood—in order to express her own life and gifts. She had loved—unwisely, too well—Peter. Like Peter, she approached the play in a state of nerves. As a practical player she knew that the girl would never win her audience unless grounds could be found for the audience to like her despite her Nietzschean philosophy. What she perhaps saw less clearly was that in her conception of the part she had to frame an answer to Peter's charges. Probably, almost certainly, she supposed the play something of a personal attack on her own life. Therefore she added her view of the girl to Peter's, and played her as a counter attack. If it had been real in the writing to Peter, it was quite as real in the playing to Grace. The result of this conflict of two aroused emotional natures was a brilliant theatrical success. Though I am not sure that the play, in its final form, meant anything. I am not sure. It was rather a baffling thing. But it stirred you, and in the third act, made you cry. Everybody cried in the third act.
The curtain came slowly down on the first act. The lights came slowly up. A house that had been profoundly still, absorbed in the clean-cut presentment of apparently real people, stirred, rustled, got up, moved into the aisles, burst into talk that rapidly swelled into a low roar. The applause came a little late, almost as if it were an after-thought, and then ran wild. There were seven curtain calls.
Down-stairs, two critics—blasé young men, wandered out into the lobby.
“Derring's good,” observed one. “This piece may land her solid on Broadway.”
“First act's all right,” replied the other casually, lighting a cigarette. “I didn't suppose Pete Mann could do it.”
Up in the gallery, Sue, looking around, pressed suddenly close to the Worm, and whispered, “Henry—quick! Look at Peter!”
The playwright stood before his aisle seat, staring with wild eyes up at the half-draped plaster ladies on the proscenium arch. A line of persons in his row were pressing toward the aisle. A young woman, next to him, touched his arm and said, “Excuse me, please!” Sue and the Worm heard her but not Peter. He continued to stare—a tall conspicuous man, in black-rimmed glasses, a black ribbon hanging from them down his long face. His hand raised to his chest, clutched what appeared to be an envelope, folded the long way. Plainly he was beside himself.
The crowd in the aisle saw him now and stared. There was whispering. Some one laughed.
Again the young woman touched his arm.
He turned, saw that he was blocking the row, noted the eyes on him. became suddenly red, and stuffing the folded envelope into his pocket and seizing his hat, rapidly elbowed his way up the aisle.