"And that emerald butterfly on her shoulder," pursued Christabel; "one would suppose it were real."
"It belonged to the Empress of the French, and was sold for three hundred and eighty guineas at Christie's," said FitzPelham; whereupon Major Bree's substantial boot came down heavily on the youth's Queen Anne shoe. "At least, the Empress had one like it," stammered FitzPelham, saying to himself, in his own vernacular, that he had "hoofed it."
"How do you like Stella Mayne?" he asked by-and-by, when the act was over.
"I am charmed with her. She is the sweetest actress I ever saw; not the greatest--there are two or three who far surpass her in genius; but there is a sweetness--a fascination. I don't wonder she is the rage. I only wonder Major Bree could have deprived me of the pleasure of seeing her all this time."
"You could stand the piece a second time, couldn't you?"
"Certainly--or a third time. It is so poetical--it carries one into a new world!"
"Pretty foot and ankle, hasn't she?" murmured FitzPelham--to which frivolous comment Miss Courtenay made no reply.
Her soul was rapt in the scene before her--the mystic wood whither Psyche had now wandered with her divine lover. The darkness of a summer night in the Greek Archipelago--fire-flies flitting athwart ilex and olive bushes--a glimpse of the distant starlit sea.
Here--goaded by her jealous sisters to a fatal curiosity--Psyche stole with her lamp to the couch of her sleeping lover, gazing spell-bound upon that godlike countenance--represented in actual flesh by a chubby round face and round brown eyes--and in her glad surprise letting fall a drop of oil from her lamp on Cupid's winged shoulder--whereon the god leaves her, wounded by her want of faith. Had he not told her they must meet only in the darkness, and that she must never seek to know his name? So ends the second act of the fairy drama. In the third, poor Psyche is in ignoble bondage--a slave to Venus, in the goddess's Palace at Cythera--a fashionable, fine-lady Venus, who leads her gentle handmaiden a sorry life, till the god of love comes to her rescue. And here, in the tiring chamber of the goddess, the playwright makes sport of all the arts by which modern beauty is manufactured. Here poor Psyche--tearful, despairing--has to toil at the creation of the Queen of Beauty, whose charms of face and figure are discovered to be all falsehood, from the topmost curl of her toupet to the arched instep under her jewelled buskin. Throughout this scene Psyche alternates between smiles and tears; and then at the last Cupid appears--claims his mistress, defies his mother, and the happy lovers, linked in each other's arms, float skyward on a shaft of lime-light. And so the graceful mythic drama ends--fanciful from the first line to the last, gay and lightly touched as burlesque, yet with an element of poetry which burlesque for the most part lacks.