re thrown opera cloaks and capes of
astonishing complexity and elaborateness. Nearly all were bare-headed,
and nearly all wore aigrettes; a score of these, a hundred of them,
nodded and vibrated with an incessant agitation over the heads of the
crowd and flashed like mica flakes as the wearers moved. Everywhere the
eye was arrested by the luxury of stuffs, the brilliance and delicacy
of fabrics, laces as white and soft as froth, crisp, shining silks,
suave satins, heavy gleaming velvets, and brocades and plushes, nearly
all of them white--violently so--dazzling and splendid under the blaze
of the electrics. The gentlemen, in long, black overcoats, and satin
mufflers, and opera hats; their hands under the elbows of their
women-folk, urged or guided them forward, distressed, preoccupied,
adjuring their parties to keep together; in their white-gloved fingers
they held their tickets ready. For all the icy blasts that burst
occasionally through the storm doors, the vestibule was uncomfortably
warm, and into this steam-heated atmosphere a multitude of heavy odours
exhaled--the scent of crushed flowers, of perfume, of sachet, and
even--occasionally--the strong smell of damp seal-skin.

Outside it was bitterly cold. All day a freezing wind had blown from
off the Lake, and since five in the afternoon a fine powder of snow had
been falling. The coachmen on the boxes of the carriages that succeeded
one another in an interminable line before the entrance of the theatre,
were swathed to the eyes in furs. The spume and froth froze on the bits
of the horses, and the carriage wheels crunching through the dry,
frozen snow gave off a shrill staccato whine. Yet for all this, a crowd
had collected about the awning on the sidewalk, and even upon the
opposite side of the street, peeping and peering from behind the broad
shoulders of policemen--a crowd of miserables, shivering in rags and
tattered comforters, who found, nevertheless, an unexplainable
satisfaction in watching this prolonged defile of millionaires.

So great was the concourse of teams, that two blocks distant from the
theatre they were obliged to fall into line, advancing only at
intervals, and from door to door of the carriages thus immobilised ran
a score of young men, their arms encumbered with pamphlets, shouting:
"Score books, score books and librettos; score books with photographs
of all the artists."

However, in the vestibule the press was thinning out. It was underst