twenty minutes past nine
All around the hall ran a horseshoe of private boxes , between the balcony and the gallery . These boxes gradually filled . At a quarter-past nine over half of them were occupied ; which fact , combined with the stylishness of the hats in them , proved that Xavier had immense skill in certain directions , and that on that night , for some reason or other , he had been doing his very best . At twenty minutes past nine the audience had coalesced and become an entity , and the group from the Quarter was stamping an imitation of the first bars of the C minor Symphony , to indicate that further delay might involve complications . Audrey sat with Miss Ingate modestly and inconspicuously in the fifth row of the stalls . Miss Ingate , prodigious in crimson , was in a state of beatitude , because she never went to concerts and imagined that she had inadvertently slipped into heaven . The mere size of the orchestra so overwhelmed her that she was convinced that it was an orchestra specially enlarged to meet the unique importance of Musa 's genius .