It was a new version, in a new medium, of an old
and perennial melodrama; but, too late for the opening scenes, the
story for the moment was incomprehensible to him. However, it had to do
with the misadventures of a simple country girl in what, obviously, was
the conventional idea of a most sophisticated and urbane society. Lee
waited, and not vainly, to see the feminine grub transformed, by
brilliant clothes, into a butterfly easily surpassing all the select
glittering creatures of the city; and he told himself that, personally,
he vastly preferred Mina Raff in her plainest dress.
It was strange--seeing her there; while, in fact, she was in New York
with far different things occupying her thoughts. Here she was no more
than an illusion, a pattern, without substance, of projected light and
shade; she had neither voice nor warmth nor color; only the most
primitive minds could be carried away, lost, in the convention of her
flat mobile effigy! Yet, after a little, he found that he as well was
absorbed in the atmosphere of emotional verity she created. It was
clear to him now that not the Mina Raff in New York, but this, was the
important reality. In herself she was little compared to what she so
miraculously did. Then--the final step in a surrender, however much he
hated the word, to art--he forgot Mina Raff completely. He lost her
partly in his own mental processes and partly in the unhappy girl she
was portraying:
It was an uncomplicated story of betrayal, of a marriage that was no
marriage, and the birth, in circumstances of wretched loneliness, of an
illegitimate baby.
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