From somewhere in the chaos two long-gloved arms came up; they were strangely shapely; they made motions like swan's necks dipping into water-lilies. A garland of fog came away, and a head on a throat appeared, a bust set upon a heap of drapery. Then the opera-cloak slipped off into the usher's hands. And now design emerged, a woman stood revealed. The head and throat were seen to be attached to a scroll of shoulders, and a figure like a column rose from the floor—strangely columnar it was, and so slender that there was merely the slightest inslope of waist, merely the slightest entasis at the hips.
In other periods only portions of the human outline have been followed by the costume. The natural lines have been broken, perverted, and caricatured by balloon sleeves, huge farthingales, or paniers like a jennet's pack-saddles, the incredible Botocudo ideal of the bustle, corsets like hour-glasses, concentric hoops about the legs, with pantalets coquetting inanely at the ankles—the almost impossible facts of fashion.
Just then the costume was hardly more of a disguise than the gold or bronze powder smeared on by those who pose as statues at the vaudevilles. Inside their outer wraps women were rather wall-papering themselves than draping their forms. It was saner so, and decenter, too, perhaps.
And yet Forbes stared at this woman as Adam must have stared at Eve when the scales were off his eyes. Even her hair was almost all her own, and it was coiled and parted with simple grace. Her head-dress was something bizarre—not a tiara of diamonds, but a black crest with a pearl or two studding it—the iridescent breast of a lyre-bird it was, though he did not know. A cord of pearls was flung around her throat. At the peak of each shoulder her gown began, but the two elements did not conjoin till just in time above the breast, and just a little too late at the back.
The fabric clung lovingly to the loins, thighs, and calves, so closely that an inverted V must be cut between the ankles to make walking possible at all. There was a train of a fish-tail sort, a little twitching afterthought. And so this woman-shape came forth from a shapelessness as Aphrodite from the sea-foam.
Forbes was so startled that he felt all the chagrin of one who is caught staring at a woman just returned from the surf in a wet bathing-suit. He shifted his eyes from her. When he looked back she had vanished into the crimson cavern of the box.
The other women followed her, and the men them. They seated themselves just as the curtain fell.
And now Forbes felt at liberty to go to his own seat, found an usher to pilot him down the aisle. He bowed and murmured "Beg pardon" and "Thank you" to each of those who shoved back awkwardly and wonderingly to let him in. He felt like explaining to them that he had not just arrived, and that he really was not so foolish or so dilatory as he looked. He put his overcoat in his extra seat and studied his program.
A voice that should have reminded him of the landaulet, but did not, caught his ear and led his eyes to the box. He was not far from the late arrivals.
They were attracting a deal of attention from the audience, and paying it none. The loudness of their speech and their laughter would have shocked him in a crowd of farmers. Coming from people of evident wealth and familiarity with town customs, it astounded him.
He had not yet seen the face of the woman of whom he had seen so much else. She was talking to a man in the interior of the box. Her back was turned to the house.
It never occurred to Forbes that it might be the same back he had followed up the Avenue. How could he have told?
That back was clothed and cloaked, and even that famous left arm was sleeved. These shoulder-sheaths, not blades, were so astoundingly bare that he felt ashamed to look at them. Their proprietress was evidently not ashamed to submit them for public inspection. One might not approve her boldness, but one could hardly fail to approve her shoulders. When she moved or shrugged or laughed or turned to speak, their exquisite integument creased and rippled like shaken cream.
At length the footlights went up, the curtain went up. The three women aligned themselves in profile along the rail as if they were seated on unseen horses. The men were mere silhouettes in the background.
The bulk of the audience was in darkness; but the people in the boxes were illumined with a light reflected from the scenery, and it warmed them like a dawn glowing upon peaks of snow.
And now, at last, Forbes saw the face he had watched for with such impatience. It did not disappoint him. At first she gave him only the profile; but that magic light of stage-craft was upon it, and once she turned her head and cast a slow, vague look along the shadowy valley of the audience. She could not have seen him, but he saw her and found her so beautiful, so bewitchingly beautiful and desirable, that he caught his breath with a stitch of pain, an ache of admiration.
Just a moment her eyes dreamed across the gloom, and she turned back to watch the stage. It was like a parting after a tryst. Then she broke the spell with a sudden throe of laughter. The little shoplifter and blackmailer on the stage was describing her efforts to learn the ways of society, the technique of pouring tea and pretending to like it. She swore, and the audience roared. Formerly an actor could always get a laugh by saying "damn." Now it must be a woman that swears.
Jarred back to reasonableness by the shock of laughter, Forbes looked again to the box to see what manner of women this woman went with. One of them was tiny but quite perfect. She had the face of a débutante under the white hair of a matron. If her age were betrayed by her neck, the dog-collar of pearls concealed the ravage. She sat exceedingly erect and seemed to be cold and haughty till another splurge of slang from the shoplifter provoked her to a laugh that was like a child's.
The other woman laughed, too, laughed large and wide. She was beautiful, too, a Rubens ideal, drawn in liberal rotundities—cheeks, chin, throat, bust, hips. No Cubist could have painted her, for she was like a cluster of soap-bubbles. Her face was a great baby's.
The men were almost invisible, mere cut-outs in black and white.
None of them had the jaded look of boredom that Forbes supposed to be the chief characteristic of New York wealth. They were as eager and irrepressible as a box-load of children fighting over a bag of peanuts at a circus.
One of the men leaned forward and whispered something; all the women turned to hear. They forgot the play, though the situation was critical. They chattered and laughed so audibly that the audience grew restive; the people on the stage looked to be distressed.
Forbes was astonished at such bad manners from such beautiful people. He wondered how the play could go on. He had heard of actors stepping out of the picture to rebuke such disturbers of the peace. He expected such an encounter now.
Then somebody in the audience hissed. Somebody called distinctly, "Shut up!" The group turned in surprise, and received another hiss in the face. Silence and shame quieted it instanter. The women blushed like grown girls threatened with a spanking. Tremendous blushes ran all down their crimson backs.
Forbes could see that they wanted to run. A kind of pluck held them. They pretended to toss their heads with contempt, but the mob had cowed them so completely that Forbes felt sorry for them—especially for her. She was too pretty for a public humiliation.
When the curtain fell on the second act Forbes saw one of the men in the box rise and leave along the side-aisle. Forbes knew the man. His name was Ten Eyck—Murray Ten Eyck.
Forbes dreaded to repeat that voyage through the strait between knees and seat-backs; but he had seen at last a man he knew. And the man he knew knew the woman he wanted to know.
CHAPTER V
THE women he passed glared hatpins at Forbes and groaned as they rose and hunched back to let him by. They clutched at the wraps he disarranged. He rumpled one elaborate hat stuck in the back of a seat, and one silk tie that had fallen out of the wire rack he kicked under the row ahead. He had an impulse to go after it; but when he realized the postures and scrambles