eight o'clock
This was the great thing they had , she concluded ; the quality of coming up to the scratch , of giving whatever it took out of themselves to meet the need of the moment . They were n't -- her use of this phrase harked back to the days of the half-back -- yellow . If you 'd walked through the train that took them back to Chicago Sunday morning , had seen them , glum , dispirited , utterly fagged out , unsustained by a single gleam of hope , you 'd have said it was impossible that they should give any sort of performance that night -- let alone a good one . But by eight o'clock that night , when the overture was called , you would n't have known them for the same people . There is , to begin with , a certain magic about make-up which lends a color of plausibility to the paradoxical theory that our emotions spring from our facial expressions rather than the other way about . Certainly to an experienced actor , his paint -- the mere act of putting it on and looking at himself in the glass as it is applied -- effects for him a solution of continuity between his real self , if you can call it that , and his part ; so that fatigues , discouragements , quarrels , ailments -- I do n't mean to say are forgotten ; they are remembered well enough , but are given the quality of belonging to some one else . But beyond all that was the feeling , on the edge of this first performance , that they were now on their own .