Barbara nodded. It was useless to tell them that she had already waited a year to find out whether Jack wanted to marry her.
The next night she dined with George Oakleigh, who told her that he had taken tickets for Eric Lane's play.
"Oh, George, I don't know that I want to go to a theatre," she said doubtfully. "I've not been for so long——"
"Isn't that all the more reason? You're the best unpaid dramatic critic in London; and I want to know what you think of it. Eric's a great friend of mine. I particularly want you to meet him.... Don't come, if you'd rather not. But I've got a box, and, if the play bores you more than my conversation, we can talk in peace."
They compromised by arriving late, but Barbara was not in the mood to enjoy herself. It was a well-constructed play with dialogue of distinction and a good sense of the theatre; the characterization, she complained, was insufferably romantic.
"I congratulate your friend on a great commercial success," she said, "but I don't want to meet him. Listen to the applause! Every single character is so unmistakably labelled that the audience greets them like old friends. The theatre's so conventional that, if you tried to shew men and women who were higher and lower than stage standards, the critics would say that your characters were freaks. On the stage a woman may be jealous or high-minded or a mixture or a saint or a thorough-going, melodramatic villainess, but she's always a child, a kitten. Men idealize us so hopelessly! We're dear little fluffy, rather silly things, with silly little mental kinks of vanity or motherliness; no man understands how mean a woman can be, the lies she'll tell and the crimes she'll commit from motives which she'd be afraid to confess. Your friend Mr. Lane has never met a woman."
"You're hard on your sex," George commented.
Barbara shook her head sadly.
"I've seen it—without its rouge and powder. Look here, Sonia's a friend of yours and of mine; we both know how she behaved to Jim, but you'd never dare put her into a play, because the audience won't accept anything that offends against its standard of human dignity, it won't accept realism which makes people unconventionally mean, it won't believe that any one who's pretty enough to attract can have a really deceitful, petty spirit. Sonia was getting rather a bad name before the war, but she marries a man who's lost his sight, and every one says that the other part was just froth and that this is the true, noble Sonia—just as nine women out of ten become true and noble at the final curtain. Sonia married that man for effect!"
"I don't think you can have seen them together," George suggested.