Yet, as a matter of fact, Arthur Wantage, all that day and evening, was in Orson Vane's house, subject to a curious mental and spiritual aphasia that afterwards became a puzzle to many famous physicians. The _Voltaire_ was Orson Vane. It was the final triumph of Professor Vanlief's thaumaturgy. Vane was now in possession of the entire mental vitality sufficient for playing the part of the evening; the lines, the every pose, came to him spontaneously, as if he were machinery moving at another's guidance. The detail of entering the theatre unobserved had been easy; it was dusk and he was muffled to the eyes. Afterwards, it was merely a matter of pigment and paints. His fingers found the use of the colors and powders as easily as his mind held the words to be spoken. There was not a soul, in the company, in the audience, that did not not find the _Voltaire_ of that night the _Voltaire_ of the entire season. Above the mere current of his speeches and his displayed emotions Orson Vane found a tide of exaltation bearing him on to a triumphant feeling of contempt for his audience. These sheep, these herdlings, these creatures of the fashion, how fine it was to fling into their faces the bitter taunts of a _Voltaire_, to see them take them smilingly, indulgently. They paid him his price, and he hated them for it. He felt that they did not really understand the half of the play's delicate finesse; he felt their appreciation was a sham, a pose, a bit of mummery even more contemptible than his own, since they paid to pose, while he, at least, had the satisfaction of their money. The curtain-fall found him aglow with the splendor of his success. The two personalties in him joined in a fever of triumph. He, Orson Vane, had been _Voltaire_; he would yet be all the other geniuses of history. He would prove himself the greatest of them all, since he could simulate them all. A certain vein of petty cunning ran under the major emotion; Orson Vane laughed to think how he had despoiled Arthur Wantage of his very temperament, his art, his spirit. This same cunning admonished, too, the prompt return of Wantage's person, after the night was over, to the Wantage residence. The commotion "in front" brought Orson to a sense of the immediate moment. The cries for a speech came over a crackling of hand-claps. He waited for several minutes. It was not well to be too complaisant with one's public. Then he gave the signal to the man at the curtain, and moved past him, to the narrow space behind the lights. He bowed. It had the very air of irony, had that bow. It does not seem humanly possible to express irony in a curving in the spine, a declension of the head, a certain pose of the hands, but Vane succeeded, just as Wantage had so often succeeded, in giving that impression. The bow over, he turned to withdraw. Let them wait, let them chafe I Commuters were missing the last trains for the night? So much the better! They would not forget him so easily.