To-night, in this grubby bedroom, smelling of teetotallers and grim, forbidding people in whom are to be found none of the genial foibles of ordinary, hearty men, he felt an excess of remorse for any unkind thing he had ever said to Eleanor. His pessimism about his play caused him to exaggerate the enormity of his offences. He pictured her, looking at him with that queer air of puzzled pathos that had so impressed him when he first saw her, and intense shame filled him when he thought that he had done or said anything to make her look at him in that way. Well, he would compensate her for any pain that he had caused her. He would love her so dearly that her life would be passed in continual sunshine and comfort. Even if she were never to return his love or to return only a slight share of it, he would devote himself to her just as completely as if she gave everything to him. His play might be miserably acted and be a failure, apart from the acting, but what mattered that! While he had Eleanor he had everything.
He went down to the theatre on the evening of the first performance in a state of calm and quietness which greatly astonished him. He had expected to tremble and quake with nervousness and to be reluctant to go near the theatre. He remembered to have read somewhere an account of the way in which some melodramatist of repute behaved on a first night. He walked up and down the Embankment while his play was being performed, mopping his fevered brow and groaning in agony. Someone had found the melodramatist on one occasion, sitting at the foot of Cleopatra's Needle, howling into his handkerchief.... John, however, had no terrors whatever when he entered the theatre, and he told himself that the melodramatist was either an extremely emotional man or a very considerable liar. There was a moderate number of people in the auditorium, enough to preserve the theatre from seeming sparsely-occupied, but not enough to justify anyone in saying that the house was full. The atmosphere resembled that of a church. People spoke, when they spoke at all, in whispers, and John was so infected by the air of solemnity that when a small boy in the gallery began to call out "Acid drops or cigarettes!" he felt that a sidesman must appear from a pew and take the lad to the police-station for brawling in a sacred edifice. He waited for the orchestra to appear, but the play began without any preliminary music. The lights were lowered, and soon afterwards someone beat the floor of the stage with a wooden mallet ... sending forth three sepulchral sounds that seemed to hammer out of the audience any tendency it might have had to enjoy itself. Then the curtain ascended, and the play began.