Chapter 5

She had looked down at them, enviously, from the balcony--she had looked
up at them, reverentially, from the stalls; but now at last she was on a
line with them, among them, she was part of the sacred semicircle whose
privilege it is, between the acts, to make the mere public forget that
the curtain has fallen.

As she swept to the left-hand seat of their crimson niche, waving Mabel
Lipscomb to the opposite corner with a gesture learned during her
apprenticeship in the stalls, Undine felt that quickening of the
faculties that comes in the high moments of life. Her consciousness
seemed to take in at once the whole bright curve of the auditorium, from
the unbroken lines of spectators below her to the culminating blaze
of the central chandelier; and she herself was the core of that vast
illumination, the sentient throbbing surface which gathered all the
shafts of light into a centre.

It was almost a relief when, a moment later, the lights sank, the
curtain rose, and the focus of illumination was shifted. The music, the
scenery, and the movement on the stage, were like a rich mist tempering
the radiance that shot on her from every side, and giving her time to
subside, draw breath, adjust herself to this new clear medium which made
her feel so oddly brittle and transparent.

When the curtain fell on the first act she began to be aware of a subtle
change in the house. In all the boxes cross-currents of movement had
set in: groups were coalescing and breaking up, fans waving and heads
twinkling, black coats emerging among white shoulders, late comers
dropping their furs and laces in the red penumbra of the background.
Undine, for the moment unconscious of herself, swept the house with her
opera-glass, searching for familiar faces. Some she knew without being
able to name them--fixed figure-heads of the social prow--others she
recognized from their portraits in the papers; but of the few from whom
she could herself claim recognition not one was visible, and as she
pursued her investigations the whole scene grew blank and featureless.

Almost all the boxes were full now, but one, just opposite, tantalized
her by its continued emptiness. How queer to have an opera-box and not
use it! What on earth could the people be doing--what rarer delight
could they be tasting? Undine remembered that the numbers of the boxes
and the names of their owners were given on the back of the programme,
and after a rapid computation she turned to consult the list. Mondays
and Fridays, Mrs. Peter Van Degen. That was it: the box was empty
because Mrs. Van Degen was dining alone with Ralph Marvell! "PETER WILL
BE AT ONE OF HIS DINNERS." Undine had a sharp vision of the Van Degen
dining-room--she pictured it as