He felt as if the play itself penetrated him with the naked elbow of his neighbour, a great stripped, handsome, red-haired lady, who conversed with a gentleman on her other side in stray dissyllables which had for his ear, in the oddest way in the world, so much sound that he wondered they hadn't more sense; and he recognised by the same law, beyond the footlights, what he was pleased to take for the very flush of English life.
Source: wiktionary