"It's old, older than the stuff that hills and Armenians are made of," he said. "The ageless tale of the inevitable lady sitting alone in the inevitable box of the inevitable theatre to which our inevitable young man has gone to wile away a tiresome evening. History supplies the formula, it is only the details for which I'm personally responsible. "There I sat, one night years ago, alone in a stall at the old Imperial; grimly smoking, and watching the footlight favourites 'getting-off' with a stage-boxful of rowdy young men who hadn't the grace even to try to imitate the few gentlemen who might at one time have been good enough to know 'em--until, on a moment, my eyes circled round the upper boxes and fixed on a marvellous lady in white, amazing and alone and unashamed.... "One has grown into the habit of using phrases trivially, but when I say that I caught my breath at the sight of that figure through the smoke, I mean that I actually did. There she suddenly was, a wonderful fact in a dreary place! A candle lighting even the dimmest recesses of that mausoleum! She, in contrast to all around, was real, exquisite life.... "And, of course, there was to her beauty the added attraction of the curious, as you can well understand. For there simply was not the slightest trace of the _demi-monde_ about her, nothing at all to suggest that she might at any moment be the mistress of a great shopkeeper--as, the deuce take it, there well might be about any woman who had the effrontery to sit so shamelessly alone and--and _soignée_ in front of a box at the Imperial! I mean, it was not the sort of thing one's sister could do and look dignified about--in fact, it is some very special and subtle quality which will prevent a well-dressed woman looking like a courtesan under certain circumstances. French women say English women haven't got it, and English women say French women have got nothing else. But this dark-haired, immobile, alien woman had just that quality--well, of utter 'rightness'; she was impeccable, you understand. It was more than an impertinence not to take for granted that she herself had walked into Cartier's and bought that rope of pearls around her throat.... For although she was in one of the upper boxes, I could see her quite clearly. "But 'desirable'--that's the word for the particular creak in the hinge of one's mind as it enfolds the beauty of such a person--desirable! You wanted to stretch out a long graceful arm above the heads of all the stuffy people around you and catch her up, not by force, for she must yield; and then, as you brought her close to you, what happened would depend entirely on the sort of woman she was and the sort of man you were....