What will the audience make of the Chorus?"

"It's for them to make what they can of it," Adela answered. "We can only give them a symbol. Art's always symbolic, isn't it?"

Mrs. Parry pursed her lips. "I wouldn't say symbolic exactly," she said slowly. "It has a significance, of course, and you've got to convey that significance to the audience. We want to present it—to interpret."

As she paused, distracted by the presentation by the poet of two kinds of sandwiches, Adela broke in again.

"But, Mrs. Parry, how can one interpret a symbol? One can only mass it. It's all of a piece, and it's the total effect that creates the symbolical force."

"Significant, not symbolical," said Mrs. Parry firmly. "You mustn't play down to your audience, but you mustn't play away from them either. You must"—she gesticulated "intertwine ... harmonize. So you must make it easy for them to get into harmony. That's what's wrong with a deal of modern art; it refuses—it doesn't establish equilibrium with its audience or what not. In a pastoral play you must have equilibrium."

"But the equilibrium's in the play," Adela urged again, "a balance of masses. Surely that's what drama is-a symbolical contrast of masses."

"Well," Mrs. Parry answered with infuriating tolerance, "I suppose you might call it that. But it's more effective to think of it as significant equilibrium-especially for a pastoral. However, don't let's be abstract. The question is, what's to be done about the Chorus? Had we better keep it in or leave it out? Which would you prefer, Mr. Stanhope?"

"I should prefer it in, if you ask me," Stanhope said politely. "But not to inconvenience the production."

"It seems to be in the forest so often," Mrs. Parry mused, dismissing cake. "There's the distant song in the first act, when the princess goes away from the palace, and the choric dialogue when. . . . It isn't Dryads, is it?"

A friend of Adela's, a massive and superb young man of twenty-five, offered a remark. "Dryads would rather wreck the eighteenth century, wouldn't they?"

"Watteau," said a young lady near Adela.