imple country ways. I can get him to talk of nothing else."

"You mean to say," Mr. Lyon replied, with the air of retorting, "that
you have asked me about nothing else."

"Oh, you know we felt a little responsible for you; and there is no
place so dangerous as the country. Now here you are protected--we put
all the wickedness on the stage, and learn to recognize and shun it."

"It may be wicked," said her mother, "but it is dull. Don't you find it
so, Mr. Henderson? I am passionately fond of Wagner, but it is too noisy
for anything tonight."

"I notice, dear," the dutiful daughter replied for all of us, "that you
have to raise your voice. But there is the ballet. Let us all listen
now."

Mr. Lyon excused himself from going with me, saying that he would call
at our hotel, and I took Henderson. "I shall count the minutes you are
going to lose," the girl said as we went out-to our box. The lobbies
in the interact were thronged with men--for the most part the young
speculators of the Chamber turned into loungers in the foyer--knowing,
alert, attitudinizing in the extreme of the mode, unable even in this
hour to give beauty the preference to business, well knowing, perhaps,
that beauty itself in these days has a fine eye for business.

I liked Henderson better in our box than in his own. Was it because
the atmosphere was more natural and genuine? Or was it Margaret's
transparent nature, her sincere enjoyment of the scene, her evident
pleasure in the music, the color, the gayety of the house, that made
him drop the slight cynical air of the world which had fitted him so
admirably a moment before? He already knew my wife and the Morgans, and,
after the greetings were made, he took a seat by Margaret, quite content
while the act was going on to watch its progress in the play of her
responsive features. How quickly she felt, how the frown followed the
smile, how, she seemed to weigh and try to apprehend the meaning of what
went on--how her every sense enjoyed life!

"It is absurd," she said, turning her bright face to him when the
curtain dropped, "to be so interested in fictitious trouble."

"I'm not so sure that it is," he replied, in her own tone; "the opera is
a sort of pulpit, and not seldom preaches an awful sermon--more plainly
than the preacher dares to make it."

"But not in nomine Dei."

"No. But who can say what is most effective? I often wonder, as I watch
the congregations coming from the churches on the