"Well, I can't help thinking so too," assented Christabel. And then the overture began--a dreamy, classical compound, made up of reminiscences of Mozart, Beethoven, and Weber--a melodious patchwork, dignified by scientific orchestration. Christabel listened dreamily to the dreamy music, thinking of Angus all the while--wondering what he was doing in the far-away Scottish land, which she knew only from Sir Walter's novels. The dove-coloured curtains were drawn apart to a strain of plaintive sweetness, and the play--half poem, half satire--began. The scene was a palace garden, in some "unsuspected isle in far-off seas." The personages were Psyche, her sisters, and the jealous goddess, whose rest had been disturbed by rumours of an earthly beauty which surpassed her own divine charms, and who approached the palace disguised as a crone, dealing in philters and simples, ribbons and perfumes, a kind of female Autolycus. First came a dialogue between Venus and the elder sisters--handsome women both, but of a coarse type of beauty, looking too large for the frame in which they appeared. Christabel and Jessie enjoyed the smartness of the dialogue, which sparkled with Aristophanian hits at the follies of the hour, and yet had a poetical grace which seemed the very flavour of the old Greek world. At last, after the interest of the fable had fairly begun, there rose the faint melodious breathings of a strange music within the palace--the quaint and primitive harmonies of a three-stringed lyre--and Psyche came slowly down the marble steps, a slender, gracious figure in classic drapery--Canova's statue incarnate. "Very pretty face," muttered the Major, looking at her through his opera-glass; "but no figure." The slim, willowy form, delicately and lightly moulded as a young fawn's, was assuredly of a type widely different from the two young women of the fleshly school who represented Psyche's jealous sisters. In their case there seemed just enough mind to keep those sleek, well-favoured bodies in motion. In Stella Mayne the soul, or, at any rate, an ethereal essence, a vivid beauty of expression, an electric brightness, which passes for the soul, so predominated over the sensual, that it would have scarcely surprised one if this fragile butterfly-creature had verily spread a pair of filmy wings and floated away into space. The dark liquid eyes, the small chiselled features, exquisitely Greek, were in most perfect harmony with the character. Amongst the substantial sensuous forms of her companions this Psyche moved like a being from the spirit world. "Oh!" cried Christabel, almost with a gasp, "how perfectly lovely!" "Yes; she's very pretty, isn't she?" muttered the Major, tugging at his grey moustache, and glaring at the unconscious Psyche from his lurking place at the back of the box. "Pretty is not the word. She is the realization of a poem."