It was not literature to
her, it was fact: as actual, as near by, as what was
happening to her at the moment and what the next hour held
in store. Seen in this light, the play regained for Darrow
its supreme and poignant reality. He pierced to the heart
of its significance through all the artificial accretions
with which his theories of art and the conventions of the
stage had clothed it, and saw it as he had never seen it: as
life.
After this there could be no question of flight, and he took
her back to the theatre, content to receive his own
sensations through the medium of hers. But with the
continuation of the play, and the oppression of the heavy
air, his attention again began to wander, straying back over
the incidents of the morning.
He had been with Sophy Viner all day, and he was surprised
to find how quickly the time had gone. She had hardly
attempted, as the hours passed, to conceal her satisfaction
on finding that no telegram came from the Farlows. "They'll
have written," she had simply said; and her mind had at once
flown on to the golden prospect of an afternoon at the
theatre. The intervening hours had been disposed of in a
stroll through the lively streets, and a repast, luxuriously
lingered over, under the chestnut-boughs of a restaurant in
the Champs Elysees. Everything entertained and interested
her, and Darrow remarked, with an amused detachment, that
she was not insensible to the impression her charms
produced.
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