He confessedly did not know very much about the art of acting, and could not even say that some part was played “in a masterly manner,” let alone tell the poor devil of an actor how he should have played it. He was, as a matter of fact, not interested in the technique of acting, but only in the effects produced. And, though he was a little ashamed of it, he could not really feel that the stage had any “duties,” either to modern problems or anything else. He still got a childlike thrill out of the fantasies enacted behind the footlights—at least for the first few moments after the curtain went up. And then, as that magic vanished for him, and he became bored by the dull spectacle and unconvincing dialogue on the stage, he became interested in the audience, for whom evidently this magic still persisted. He wondered why, and tried to see the play with their eyes, to find the things in it that held them, if not breathless, at least coughless, for minutes at a time. What emotions were those that were so touched by the cheap tears and tawdry heroisms of “The Witching Hour” and “The Third Degree”? Why was it that they liked to see the heroine in distress, the hero unjustly accused? Felix set himself the task of proving that he knew why they liked these things—and he described the commonplace predicaments and familiar crises of current drama in terms which conveyed to his own mind some real emotional excitement, with only a touch or two of humorous satire as he resumed his own proper character as a philosophic observer. He found that he could translate the most absurd plot into something authentically interesting to himself—as if the worst play in the world were, after all, only a good play badly conceived. And in this mood, seeing bad plays through the eyes of an audience to whom they were interesting, he too became interested. He discovered some at least of the secrets of that wish-world of the theatre, in which what happens is what we want to happen: and, only when conscience pinches too hard, and reminds us that crime must be punished and virtue rewarded, what _ought_ to happen—but not at all, no, never, a place where things happen as they do in everyday life! A strange world of pseudo-realities, elaborately persuading us at the outset that it is the same world of houses and streets as ours, inhabited by people like ourselves, wearing the same clothes and talking the same talk, ruled by the same eternal laws of probability—and then making come true for us for an hour our wildest, silliest, loveliest, most impossible dreams! 2 It was fascinating, this imaginative insight into people’s minds. And—in the absence of a real play—a vaudeville act or moving-picture or burlesque show afforded him the same, or even a more profound and startling, enlightenment.