He himself escaped behind the scenes as soon as Miss Bretherton's last recall was over, and the box was filled in his absence with a stream of friends, and a constant murmur of congratulation, which was music in the ears of Madame de Chateauvieux, and, for the moment, silenced in Kendal his own throbbing and desolate consciousness.
'There never was a holiday turned to such good account before,' a gray-haired dramatic critic was saying to her, a man with whose keen, good-natured face London had been familiar for the last twenty years.
'What magic has touched the beauty, Madame de Chateauvieux?
Last spring we all felt as though one fairy godmother at least had been left out at the christening.

And now it would seem as though even she had repented of it, and brought her gift with the rest.

Well, well, I always felt there was something at the bottom in that nature that might blossom yet.

Most people who are younger at the trade than I would not hear of it.

It was commonly agreed that her success would last just as long as the first freshness of her beauty, and no more.