Charmian really had influence with Crayford, and she used it, revelling in a sense of her power and importance. He consulted her about many points in the performance. And she spoke her mind with decision, growing day by day in self-reliance. In the theater she was generally surrounded, and she grew to love it as she had never loved any place before. The romance and beauty of Djenan-el-Maqui were as nothing in comparison with the fascination of the Monster with the Maw, vast, dark, and patient, waiting for its evening provender. To Charmian it seemed like a great personality. Often she found herself thinking of it as sentient, brooding over the opera, secretly attentive to all that was going on in connection with it. She loved its darkness, the ghostly lightness of the covers spread over it, the ranges of its gaping boxes, the far-off mystery of its galleries receding into a heaven of ebon blackness. She wandered about it, sitting first here, then there, becoming intimate with the monster on whom she sometimes felt as if her life and fortunes depended. "All this we are doing for you!" something within her seemed to whisper. "Will you be satisfied with our efforts? Will you reward us?" And then, in imagination, she saw the monster changed. No longer it brooded, watched, considered, waited. It had sprung into ardent life, put off its darkness, wrapped itself in a garment of light. "You have given me what I needed!" she heard it saying. "Look!" And she saw the crowd! Then sometimes she shut her eyes. She wanted to feel the crowd, those masses of souls in masses of bodies for which she had done so much. Always surely they had been keeping the ring for Claude and for her. And it seemed to her that, unseen, they had circled the Isle in the far-off Algerian garden where she first spoke of her love and desire for Claude, that they had ever since been attending upon her life. Had they not muttered about the white house that held the worker? Had they not stared at the one who sat waiting by the fountain? Had they not seen the arrival of Jacob Crayford? Had they not assisted at those long colloquies when the opera which was for them was changed? Absurdly, she felt as if they had. And now, very soon, it would be for them to speak. And striving to shut her eyes more firmly, or pressing her fingers upon them, Charmian saw moving hands, a forest of them below, circles above circles of them, and in the distance of the gods a mist of them. And she saw the shining of thousands of eyes, in which were mirrored strangely, almost mystically, souls that Claude's music, conceived in patience and labor, had moved and that wished to tell him so.