No wonder she had passed it; with all she had expected at the back of her mind! The strip of pavement outside was dark, with not so much as a single taxi in sight; the door half-shut, the dreary vestibule badly-lighted, empty, smelling of damp. The sodden-looking sketch of a man in the pay-box seemed half asleep; stretched, yawned when she spoke, pushing a strip of pink paper towards her as she gave her name. "For two." He poked out a long neck and peered round the edge of the box, like a tortoise from its shell. "The other lydy wasn't not able ter come ter-night," answered Jenny with dignity, and the beast grinned, displaying a wreckage of broken teeth. "Ain't not what you might call a crowd, anyway," he remarked. She could have killed him for that! She realised the white face of a clock, but she would not look at it. She was early, that was it. Look how she had hurried. No wonder that she was early. And great ladies were always late: she had learnt that from the _Daily Mail_ stories. "Two an' two make four--them too late an' me too early!" she said to herself, with a gallant effort after her own brisk way of taking things, a surer tap of heels on the stone floor as she turned towards a swing-door to her left; pushed it open, and was hit in the face by what seemed like a thick black curtain. A dim white-gloved hand was thrust through it and took her ticket. "Mind you don't fall--no good wasting the lights until they come--if ever they does come," exhorted and explained a voice out of the darkness; for, after all, it was not a curtain, but just darkness. At first Jenny could see nothing. Then, little by little, it seemed as though different objects crept forward, one by one, like wild animals from their lair. Those white patches, the hands of two white-gloved men, holding sheaves of programmes--she realised one between her own fingers--whispering together. There was the platform, the great piano sprawling over it; and in front of this, rows and rows and rows--and rows upon rows--of empty seats. She looked behind her--they had argued long over the question of places for herself and his mother. "The very best," that's what Ben had said; but they fought against this, fought and conquered, for the best seats meant money. "What's a seat more or less, I'd like to know?" "Money, all money." Old Mrs. Cohen had been firm upon this point. Still, there were a great many seats yet further back--and all empty: a little raised, seeming to push themselves forward with the staring vacuity of an idiot: more seats overhead in a curving balcony, rising above each other as though proud of their emptiness. It would have been impossible to believe that mere vacant places could wear so sinister, as well as foolish, an aspect. An idiot, but a cruel idiot, too: the whole thing one cruel idiot, of the sort that likes to pull legs from flies.