Here--goaded by her jealous sisters to a fatal curiosity--Psyche stole with her lamp to the couch of her sleeping lover, gazing spell-bound upon that godlike countenance--represented in actual flesh by a chubby round face and round brown eyes--and in her glad surprise letting fall a drop of oil from her lamp on Cupid's winged shoulder--whereon the god leaves her, wounded by her want of faith. Had he not told her they must meet only in the darkness, and that she must never seek to know his name? So ends the second act of the fairy drama. In the third, poor Psyche is in ignoble bondage--a slave to Venus, in the goddess's Palace at Cythera--a fashionable, fine-lady Venus, who leads her gentle handmaiden a sorry life, till the god of love comes to her rescue. And here, in the tiring chamber of the goddess, the playwright makes sport of all the arts by which modern beauty is manufactured. Here poor Psyche--tearful, despairing--has to toil at the creation of the Queen of Beauty, whose charms of face and figure are discovered to be all falsehood, from the topmost curl of her toupet to the arched instep under her jewelled buskin. Throughout this scene Psyche alternates between smiles and tears; and then at the last Cupid appears--claims his mistress, defies his mother, and the happy lovers, linked in each other's arms, float skyward on a shaft of lime-light. And so the graceful mythic drama ends--fanciful from the first line to the last, gay and lightly touched as burlesque, yet with an element of poetry which burlesque for the most part lacks. Christabel's interest had been maintained throughout the performance. "How extraordinarily silent you have been all the evening, Jessie!" she said, as they were putting on their cloaks; "surely, you like the play!" "I like it pretty well. It is rather thin, I think; but then, perhaps, that is because I have 'Twelfth Night' still in my memory, as we heard Mr. Brandram recite it last week at Willis's Rooms." "Nobody expects modern comedy to be as good as Shakespeare," retorted Christabel; "you might as well find fault with the electric light for not being quite equal to the moon. Don't you admire that exquisite creature?" "Which of them?" asked Jessie, stolidly, buttoning her cloak. "Which of them! Oh, Jessie, you have generally such good taste. Why, Miss Mayne, of course. It is almost painful to look at the others. They are such common earthy creatures, compared with her!"