England -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Mothers and daughters -- Fiction; Paris (France) -- Fiction; Women -- Fiction
Audrey sat with Miss Ingate modestly and inconspicuously in the fifth row
of the stalls. Miss Ingate, prodigious in crimson, was in a state of
beatitude, because she never went to concerts and imagined that she had
inadvertently slipped into heaven. The mere size of the orchestra so
overwhelmed her that she was convinced that it was an orchestra specially
enlarged to meet the unique importance of Musa's genius. "They _must_ think
highly of him!" she said. She employed the time in looking about her. She
had already found, besides many other Anglo-Saxon acquaintances, Rosamund,
in black, Tommy with Nick, and Mr. Cowl, who was one seat to Audrey's left
in the sixth row of the stalls. Also Mr. Gilman and Madame Piriac and
Monsieur Piriac in a double box. Audrey and herself ought to have been in
that box, and had the afternoon developed otherwise they probably would
have been in that box. Fortunately at the luncheon, Audrey, who had bought
various lots of seats, had with the strange cautiousness of a young girl
left herself free to utilise or not to utilise the offered hospitality of
Mr. Gilman's double box, and Mr. Gilman had not pressed her for a decision.
Was it not important that the hall should seem as full as possible? When
Miss Ingate, pushing her investigations farther, had discovered not merely
Monsieur Dauphin, but Mr. Ziegler, late of Frinton and now resident in
Paris, her cup was full.
"It's vehy wonderful, _vehy_ wonderful!" said she.
But it was Audrey who most deeply had the sense of the wonderfulness of the
thing. For it was Audrey who had created it. Having months ago comprehended
that a formal and splendid debut was necessary for Musa if he was to
succeed within a reasonable space of time, she had willed the debut within
her own brain. She alone had thought of it. And now the realisation seemed
to her to be absolutely a miracle. Had she read of such an affair a year
earlier in a newspaper--with the words "Paris," "_tout Paris_," "young
genius," and so on--she would have pictured it as gloriously, thrillingly
romantic, and it indeed was gloriously and thrillingly romantic. She
thought: "None of these people sitting around me know that I have brought
it about, and that it is all mine." The thought was sweet. She felt like an
invisible African genie out of the Thousand and One Nights.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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