It is said that Bardeau acted like a person beside himself. He raged up and down the foyer, appealing to the people to come back, but all in vain. The entire performance came to an end. Even those who remained in their seats were so excited and so eager in discussing the matter that Bardeau himself, after consulting with his friends, declared it was impossible to continue.

Now follows another phase of this whole astonishing affair. More than once, it has happened in this city that a questionable dramatic performance by reformers or the pulpit has received such an advertisement from the condemnation that crowds have flocked to see it, and the very denunciation of it has been the means of its larger patronage.

But Manager Bardeau cannot console himself with any such expectation in this case. The perfectly terrible and scathing picture of the depraved character of the performance that Jesus uttered has put “The Girdle of Venus” as a production outside even the lowest patronage of the high life of this town.

The pulpit and church generally are also tremendously aroused by Jesus’s action. Public sentiment is growing stronger every hour. The recent revelations in regard to the social evil by the Expert Commission has also emphasized the close connection between sexual debaucheries in New York and suggestive plays like “The Girdle of Venus.” The public is clamoring for more decency and a censorship of the drama.

Jesus seems to have seized the psychological moment for his action, and the people are with him. Even Bardeau has had sense enough not to follow up his fiasco of last night and issue a warrant for Jesus’s arrest. Even he realizes something of Jesus’s fast-increasing hold on the people.

Besides all this, another event has been added to the series which has reduced Manager Bardeau to despair. Avonarina, with her passionate temperament roused to anger by the unexpected interruption of her triumph, has canceled her contract and declares no inducement will prevail on her or her company to appear at the opera house again. She will not subject herself or her people, she says, to the fanatical insults of those who claim to be the moral arbiters of artistic productions. So she is packing up her properties preparatory to a hasty and final exit from the city, leaving Manager Bardeau to face deep failure and heavy loss. Needless to say, he is in despair, and is loud in his verbal expressions of hatred for Jesus and all he represents.

It is practically impossible to explain to people who live outside of New York the exact state of public feeling in this city which surges around the person of Jesus. Nothing else is talked about. Men and women of all classes are discussing his action, his sermons, himself. The newspapers are bewildered in their attempt to narrate the daily events that follow his course.