together to the most "advanced" play in the newest of new
theatres.

_A propos_ our theatre-going together, I must not forget a story about
her which goes back to that bloomer period. A little while ago, calling
to take tea with her, I found her seated with a fine soldierly
white-haired "old" man, and they were in such merry talk that I felt
that perhaps I was interrupting old memories. But they generously took
me into the circle of their reminiscence. They had been laughing as I
came in--"Shall I tell him, General?" she said, "what we were laughing
about?" Then she did. She and the General had been girl and boy
together, and as they came to eighteen and nineteen had been
semi-serious sweethearts. The embryo General--no doubt because of her
pretty face--had taken all her student vagaries with lover-like
seriousness, and had, on one occasion, assisted in a notable enterprise.
The bloomers had not been definitely donned at that time, but they were
on the way, glimmering ahead as a discussed ideal. Whether it was as a
preliminary experiment, or only in consequence of a "dare," I am not
quite sure. I think it was a little of both, and that the General had
dared Irene to go with him to the opera (in the gallery) dressed in
boy's clothes. She accepted the challenge, borrowing a suit of clothes
from her brother for the purpose. Her figure, according to the General's
account, had looked anything but masculine, and her hair, tucked up
under her boy's hat as best she could, was a peculiar peril. How her
heart had almost stopped beating as a policeman had turned upon the
youthful pair a suspicious scrutiny, how they had taken to their heels
at his glance, how she had crimsoned at the box-office, and hid her face
behind a fat man as they had scurried past the ticket-attendant, and how
during the whole performance a keen-faced woman had glanced at her with
a knowing persistency that seemed to threaten her with imminent exposure
and arrest, and how wonderful the whole thing had been--just to be in
boy's clothes and go in them to the theatre with one's sweetheart. O
youth! youth! youth!

As I looked at the General with his white hair, and Irene with her
quaint little old lady's cap over her girlish face, and visualized for
myself those two figures before me as they had appeared on the night of
that escapade, I realized that the real romance of life is made by
memory, and that for these two old friends to be able thus to recall
toge