‘Very well.’ She looked at herself coldly and searchingly in the long glass and added, ‘I will go out.’

Martyn opened the door. Her employer glanced critically at her. ‘You’re as white as a sheet,’ she said, ‘what’s the matter?’

Martyn stammered, ‘Am I? I’m sorry, madam. It must have been the first act.’

‘Did you like it?’

‘Like it?’ Martyn repeated. ‘Oh, yes, I liked it.’

‘As much as that?’ As easily as if she had passed from one room into another, Miss Hamilton re-entered her mood of enchantment. ‘What a ridiculous child you are,’ she said. ‘It’s only actresses who are allowed to have temperaments.’

She went out to the stage, and as Martyn followed her she was surprised to feel in herself a kind of resistance to this woman who could so easily command her own happiness or misery.

An improvised dressing-room had been built on the stage for the quick change, and in or near it Martyn spent the whole of the second act. She was not sure when the quick change came, and didn’t like to ask anybody. She therefore spent the first quarter of an hour on tenterhooks, hearing the dialogue, but not seeing anything of the play.

After a short introductory passage the act opened with a long scene between Helena Hamilton and Adam Poole in which their attraction to each other was introduced and established, and her instinctive struggle against her environment made clear and developed. The scene was admirably played by both of them, and carried the play strongly forward. When Miss Hamilton came off she found her dresser bright eyed and excited. Martyn effected the change without any blunders and in good time. Miss Hamilton’s attention seemed to be divided between her clothes and the scene which was now being played between J. G. Darcey, Poole and her husband. This scene built up into a quarrel between Poole and Bennington which at its climax was broken by Poole saying in his normal voice, ‘I dislike interrupting dress-rehearsals, Ben, but we’ve had this point over and over again. Please take the line as we rehearsed it.’

There was complete silence, perhaps for five seconds, and then, unseen, so that Martyn formed no picture of what he was doing or how he looked, Bennington began to giggle. The sound wavered and bubbled into a laugh. Helena Hamilton whispered: ‘Oh, my God!’ and went out to the stage. Martyn followed. A group of stage-hands who had been moving round the set stopped dead as if in suspended animation. Parry Percival, waiting off-stage, turned with a look of elaborate concern to Miss Hamilton and mimed bewilderment.