He was sitting very near me, leaning his arm on the velvet rail which divided the boxes. He was looking at the stage. Two young girls and a very beautiful woman, beautifully dressed, were with him. Save for his formal dress, he looked exactly as he looked when I had said good-by to him in Twiney's pasture.

I was terrified for fear he should turn and look at me. I longed, as I had never longed for anything, to have him turn and look. I shrank back lest I should find that I must speak to him. I was wild with the wish to lean and speak his name. What if he had forgotten? Not until I caught the lift of his brow as he turned, the line of his chin, the touch of his hand, already familiar, to his forehead, did I know how well I had remembered. And then, abruptly, I was shot through with a sweetness and a pride: The time had come! I could meet him as I had dreamed of meeting him, speak to him as I had hoped sometime to speak to him, as some one a little within his world....

"The bally trouble with opera—" Gerald was beginning.

"Please, please!" I said. "You talked right through that act, Gerald. Let me sit still now!"

Mr. Ember, his face turned somewhat toward the house, was talking to the woman beside him.

" ... the new day," he said. "Such a place as this gives one hope. For all the folly of it, some do care. Here is music—a good deal segregated, in a place apart, for folk to come and participate. And they come—by jove, you know, they come!"

The woman said something which I did not hear.

"Not as pure an example as a symphony concert," he said, "no. There they demand nothing—no accessories, no deception, no laughter—even no story! That is music, pure and undefiled, and, it seems to me, really socialized. There participation is complete, with no interventions. I tell you we're coming on! Any day now, the drama may do the same thing!"

He listened to the woman again, and nodded, without looking at her. That made me think of a new wonder—of what it would be to have him understand one like that.

"Ah, yes," he said, "there's the heartbreak. God knows how long it will be before these things will be for more than the few. This whole thing,"—his arm went out toward the house—"and us with it, are sitting on the chests of the rest of them. And that isn't so bad, bad as it is. The worst is that we don't even know it."

"But what is one to do?" she cried—her voice was so eager that I caught some of what she said. "What can one do?"

"Find your corner and dig like a devil," he said. "I suppose I should say go at it like a god. Only we don't seem to know how to do that—yet."

He sat silent for a minute, looking over the house.

"We don't even half know that the other fellow is here," he said. "The isolation in audiences is frightful. Look at us now—we don't even guess we're all on the same job." He laughed. "We need to unionize!"

Some one else came to their box and joined them. He rose, moved away, talked with them all. Then he came to his place again, very near me, and sat silent while the others talked. I could see his head against the velvet stage curtain, and his fine clear profile. But now it was as if I were looking at him down a measureless distance.

I looked down at my yellow dress and my yellow slippers, at my hands that were manicured under my long gloves. I thought of the things they had taught me, about moving and speaking and eating. I thought how proud I was that I had made myself different. And to-night, when I first saw him in that box, it was as if I had come running to him, like a little child with a few bangles—and I had thought I could meet him now, almost like an equal.

And I saw now that the girl who had sat there outside the Katytown inn and had eaten her peaches, and had tried to flirt with him, wasn't much farther away from him—not much farther away—than I was, there in the opera box in my yellow dress, with a year of school behind me. And my only chance to help in all this that he understood and lived was to go with Rose; and I had let that slip, so that I could come here and show off how well I looked, with my words—and my hair—done different.

The place where he lived every day of his life was a place that I had never gone in or guessed or dreamed could be. He was living for some other reason than I had ever found out about. And I had thought that I was almost ready to see him now!

As far as I could, I drew back toward the partition, out of his possible sight. But I heard the last act as I had never heard music before—because I heard it as he was hearing it, as we all over the house might have been listening to it. I listened with him. And all the anguish and striving in the world were in the music and the music's way of trying to make this clear. It said it so plain that I wondered all of us didn't stand up in our places and "go at it like gods."

Before the curtain, and in the high moment of the act, they came for us. Mrs. Dudley liked to go down and give her carriage number early, especially when a supper was on. So we went, and I left him there. I saw him last against the crude setting of a prison, with the music remembering back to what it had been saying long before.