He was there again. She saw him when she took her first glance at the restless Manhattan audience--down in the front row with his head bent a bit forward and his gray eyes fixed on her. And she knew that to him they were alone together in a world where the high-rouged row of ballet faces and the massed whines of the violins were as imperceivable as powder on a marble Venus. An instinctive defiance rose within her. "Silly boy!" she said to herself hurriedly, and she didn't take her encore. "What do they expect for a hundred a week--perpetual motion?" she grumbled to herself in the wings. "What's the trouble? Marcia?" "Guy I don't like down in front." During the last act as she waited for her specialty she had an odd attack of stage fright. She had never sent Horace the promised post-card. Last night she had pretended not to see him-- had hurried from the theatre immediately after her dance to pass a sleepless night in her apartment, thinking--as she had so often in the last month--of his pale, rather intent face, his slim, boyish fore, the merciless, unworldly abstraction that made him charming to her. And now that he had come she felt vaguely sorry--as though an unwonted responsibility was being forced on her. "Infant prodigy!" she said aloud. "What?" demanded the negro comedian standing beside her. "Nothing--just talking about myself." On the stage she felt better. This was her dance--and she always felt that the way she did it wasn't suggestive any more than to some men every pretty girl is suggestive. She made it a stunt. "Uptown, downtown, jelly on a spoon, After sundown shiver by the moon." He was not watching her now. She saw that clearly. He was looking very deliberately at a castle on the back drop, wearing that expression he had worn in the Taft Grill. A wave of exasperation swept over her--he was criticising her. "That's the vibration that thrills me, Funny how affection fi-lls me Uptown, downtown---" Unconquerable revulsion seized her. She was suddenly and horribly conscious of her audience as she had never been since her first appearance. Was that a leer on a pallid face in the front row, a droop of disgust on one young girl's mouth? These shoulders of hers--these shoulders shaking--were they hers? Were they real? Surely shoulders weren't made for this! "Then--you'll see at a glance I'll need some funeral ushers with St. Vitus dance At the end of the world I'll---" The bassoon and two cellos crashed into a final chord. She paused and poised a moment on her toes with every muscle tense, her young face looking out dully at the audience in what one young girl afterward called "such a curious, puzzled look," and then without bowing rushed from the stage. Into the dressing-room she sped, kicked out of one dress and into another, and caught a taxi outside.