Here the strains of the orchestra ceased. The lights were turned low in the body of the house. The curtain went up. As it did so a cold draught drew from regions behind the stage, laden with that indefinable odour of gas, glue, humanity, flagged stair and alleyways, paint, canvas, carpentry, and underground places the sun never penetrates, which haunts the working part of every theatre. Poppy smiled as she snuffed it, with a queer mingling of enjoyment and repulsion. For as is the smell of ocean to the seafarer, of mother-earth to the peasant, of incense to the priest, so is the smell of the theatre to the player. Nature may revolt; but the spell holds. Once an actor always an actor. The mark of the calling is indelible. Even to the third and fourth generation there is no rubbing it out. "I suppose it would have been wiser if I had stuck to the profession," Poppy commented to herself. "I should have been a leading lady by now, drawing my thirty to forty pounds a week. I had the root of the matter in me. Have it still, worse luck; for it's the sort of root which asserts its continued existence by aching at times like that of a broken tooth. It was a wrench to give it all up. But then those rotten plays of his, inflated impossible stuff, which would never act--couldn't act!--and I carrying them round to manager after manager and using all the gentle arts I knew to get them accepted. Oh! it was very dignified, it was very pretty! And then his perpetual persecutions for money, his jealousy and spite, and his fine feelings, his infernal superiority--yes, that was what really did the job. Flesh and blood couldn't stand it. To prove to a woman, at three meals daily, that she couldn't hold a candle to you in birth, or brains, or education; and then expect her to slave for you--and make it jolly hot for her if she didn't, too--while you sat at home and caressed the delusion of your own heaven-born genius in the only decently comfortable chair in the house! No, it was not good enough--that it was not." Poppy surveyed the stage, unseeing, her great eyes wide with unlovely memories. "I wonder what's become of him," she said presently. "He hasn't dunned me for months. Has he found some other poor wretch to bleed? Must have, I imagine, for he always declared he was on the edge of starvation. Supposing that was true, though--supposing he has starved?" Her thought sank away into a wordless reverie of the dreariest description. Suddenly she roused herself, clenching her hands in her lap. "Well, supposing he has, what does it matter to me? If ever a man deserved to starve, he did, vain, lazy, cowardly, self-seeking jackal of a fellow. Why in the name of reason should I trouble about him--specially to-night? But then why, whenever I am a bit done, does the remembrance of him always come back?" Poppy yawned again, staring blankly at the persons on the stage, hearing the sound of their speech but knowing only the sense of her own thought.