He had secured an aisle seat near the stage at an outrageous price; the main show was still thundering and fizzing and glittering as he entered the theatre; so he stood in the rear behind the orchestra until the descending curtain extinguished the outrageous glare and din. Then he went down the aisle, and as he seated himself Tressa Norne stepped from the wings and stood before the lowered curtain facing an expectant but oddly undemonstrative audience. The girl worked rapidly, seriously, and in silence. She seemed a mere child there behind the footlights, not more than sixteen anyway—her winsome eyes and wistful lips unspoiled by the world’s wisdom. Yet once or twice the mouth drooped for a second and the winning eyes darkened to a remoter blue—the brooding iris hue of far horizons. She wore the characteristic tabard of stiff golden tissue and the gold pagoda-shaped headpiece of a Yezidee temple girl. Her flat, slipper-shaped foot-gear was of stiff gold, too, and curled upward at the toes. All this accentuated her apparent youth. For in face and throat no firmer contours had as yet modified the soft fullness of immaturity; her limbs were boyish and frail, and her bosom more undecided still, so that the embroidered breadth of gold fell flat and straight from her chest to a few inches above the ankles. She seemed to have no stock of paraphernalia with which to aid the performance; no assistant, no orchestral diversion, nor did she serve herself with any magician’s patter. She did her work close to the footlights. Behind her loomed a black curtain; the strip of stage in front was bare even of carpet; the orchestra remained mute. But when she needed anything—a little table, for example—well, it was suddenly there where she required it—a tripod, for instance, evidently fitted to hold the big iridescent bubble of glass in which swarmed little tropical fishes—and which arrived neatly from nowhere. She merely placed her hands before her as though ready to support something weighty which she expected and—suddenly, the huge crystal bubble was visible, resting between her hands. And when she tired of holding it, she set it upon the empty air and let go of it; and instead of crashing to the stage with its finny rainbow swarm of swimmers, out of thin air appeared a tripod to support it. Applause followed, not very enthusiastic, for the sort of audience which sustains the shows of which her performance was merely an _entr’ acte_ is an audience responsive only to the obvious. Nobody ever before had seen that sort of magic in America. People scarcely knew whether or not they quite liked it. The lightning of innovation stupefies the dull; ignorance is always suspicious of innovation—always afraid to put itself on record until its mind is made up by somebody else.