From the distance of the gallery she looked quite
passably youthful, and beyond question she had a dominating presence
in her resplendent costume. She was incomparably and amazingly better
than she had been at the few previous rehearsals which Edward Henry
had been unfortunate enough to witness. She even reminded him of his
earliest entrancing vision of her.
"Some people may _like_ this!" he admitted, with a gleam of optimism.
Hitherto, for weeks past, he had gone forward with his preparations in
the most frigid and convinced pessimism. It seemed to him that he had
become involved in a vast piece of machinery, and that nothing short
of blowing the theatre up with dynamite would bring the cranks and
pistons to a stop. And yet it seemed to him also that everything was
unreal, that the contracts he signed were unreal, and the proofs
he passed, and the posters he saw on the walls of London, and the
advertisements in the newspapers. Only the cheques he drew had the air
of being real. And now, in a magic flash, after a few moments gazing
at the stage, he saw all differently. He scented triumph from afar
off, as one sniffs the tang of the sea. On the morrow he had to
meet Nellie at Euston, and he had shrunk from meeting her, with her
terrible remorseless, provincial, untheatrical common sense; but
now, in another magic flash, he envisaged the meeting with a
cock-a-doodle-doo of hope.
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