Waves of suffering passed darkly over the mother, incredulity swiftly followed by a frozen knowledge; she tried with her lips, her mouth, to breath life into the flesh already meaningless, lost to her. Then the tragedy of existence drew her face into a mask universal and timeless, a staring tearless shocked regard as white and inhuman as plaster of Paris. Emotion choked at Lee's throat; and, in a sense of shame at having been so shaken, he admitted that Mina Raff had an extraordinary ability: he evaded the impressive reality by a return to the trivial fact. In the gloom there was only a scattering of applause, a failure of approbation caused either by an excess of emotion in the audience, or--this he thought more probable--a general uneasiness before a great moment of life. The crowded theatre was wholly relieved, itself again, in a succeeding passage of trivial clowning. Hatred pursued the youthful informally maternal figure: that, eventually, she was saved by the love of an individual was small before the opposed mass--women surrounded her with vitriolic whispers, women turned her maliciously from house to house, a woman had betrayed her. Finally the tide of Christianity rose, burst, in a biblical father who drove her into a night of snow that was a triumph of the actual substituted for the cut paper of stage convention. That she would be rescued, no doubt was permitted; and Lee took no part in the storm of applause which greeted this act of satisfactory heroics. The other spirit had appalled him: in his state of mental doubt--it might equally have been a condition of obscure hope--he had been rudely shoved toward pessimism; the converse of the announced purpose of the picture. The audience, for one thing, was so depressingly wrong in the placing of its merriment: it laughed delightedly at a gaunt feminine vindictiveness hurrying through the snow on an errand of destruction. The fact that the girl's maternity was transcendent in a generous and confident heart, made lovely by spiritual passion, escaped everyone. The phrase, spiritual passion, had occurred to him without forethought and he wondered if it were permissible, if it meant anything? It did decidedly to him; he told himself further that it was the fusion of the body and all the aspirations called spirit in one supreme act of feeling.