Paula entered the theatre a moment before the curtain rose, but in the remaining seconds of light, discovered in the fourth aisle far to the right--"the finest, lowest head" and the long white face of Stephen Cabot. If a man's face may be called beautiful, his was--firm, delicate, poetic,--brilliant eyes, livid pallor. And the hand in which the thin cheek rested, while large and chalky-white, was slender as a girl's.... In the middle of the first act, a tall, elderly man shuffled down the aisle and sank into the chair in front of Paula, where he sprawled, preparing to be bored. This was Felix Larch, one of the best known of the metropolitan critics, notorious as a play-killer. The first-night crowd can be counted on. It meant nothing to Vhruebert that the house was packed. The venture was his up to the rise of the curtain. Paula was absorbed by the first two acts of the play, but did not feel herself fit to judge. She was too intensely interested in the career of Selma Cross; in the face of Stephen Cabot; in the attitudes of Felix Larch, who occasionally forgot to pose. It was all very big and intimate, but the bigger drama, up to the final curtain, was the battle for success against the blasé aspirations of the audience and the ultra-critical enemy personified in the man before her. The small and excellent company was balanced to a crumb. Adequate rehearsals had finished the work. Then the lines were rich, forceful and flowing--strange with a poetic quality that "got across the footlights." Paula noted these exterior matters with relief. Unquestionably the audience forgot itself throughout the second act. Paula realized, with distaste, that her own critical sense was bristling for trouble. She had hoped to be as receptive to emotional enjoyment as she imagined the average play-goer to be. Though she failed signally in this, her sensibilities were in no way outraged, nor even irritated. On the contrary, she began to rise to the valor of the work and its performance. The acting of Selma Cross, though supreme in repression, was haunting, unforgettable. Felix Larch had twice disturbed her by taking his seat in the midst of the first and second acts. She had heard that he rarely sat out a whole performance, and took it therefore as a good omen when he returned, in quite a gentlemanly fashion, as the final curtain rose.