From now on it was up to the company!
The appearance, back on the stage, of John Galbraith in evening dress,
just as the call of the first act brought them trooping from their
dressing-rooms, intensified this sensation. He was going to be,
to-night, simply one of the audience.
As a sample of the new spirit, Rose noted with hardly a sensation of
surprise, that Patricia Devereux nodded amiably enough to Stewart Lester
and observed that she believed the thing was going to go; and that
Lester in reply said, yes, he believed it was.
Rose herself was completely dominated by it. Her nerves--slack, frayed,
numb, an hour ago--had sprung miraculously into tune. She not only
didn't feel tired. It seemed she never could feel tired again. Not even,
going back to her university days, on the eve of a class basket-ball
game, or a tennis match, had she felt that fine thrill of buoyant
confidence and adequacy quite so strongly!
It wasn't until along in the third act that the audience became, for
her, anything but a colloid mass--something that you squeezed and
thumped and worked as you did clay, to get into a properly plastic
condition of receptivity, so that the jokes, the songs, the dances,
even the spindling little shafts of romance that you shot out into it,
could be felt to dig in and take hold.
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