s likes it already, perhaps, but I think a
good many of the other forty-nine go in order to learn to like it, and
the rest in order to be able to talk knowingly about it. The latter
usually hum the airs while they are being sung, so that their neighbors
may perceive that they have been to operas before. The funerals of these
do not occur often enough.

A gentle, old-maidish person and a sweet young girl of seventeen sat
right in front of us that night at the Mannheim opera. These people
talked, between the acts, and I understood them, though I understood
nothing that was uttered on the distant stage. At first they were
guarded in their talk, but after they had heard my agent and me
conversing in English they dropped their reserve and I picked up many
of their little confidences; no, I mean many of HER little
confidences--meaning the elder party--for the young girl only listened,
and gave assenting nods, but never said a word. How pretty she was,
and how sweet she was! I wished she would speak. But evidently she was
absorbed in her own thoughts, her own young-girl dreams, and found a
dearer pleasure in silence. But she was not dreaming sleepy dreams--no,
she was awake, alive, alert, she could not sit still a moment. She was
an enchanting study. Her gown was of a soft white silky stuff that clung
to her round young figure like a fish's skin, and it was rippled over
with the gracefulest little fringy films of lace; she had deep, tender
eyes, with long, curved lashes; and she had peachy cheeks, and a
dimpled chin, and such a dear little rosebud of a mouth; and she was so
dovelike, so pure, and so gracious, so sweet and so bewitching. For long
hours I did mightily wish she would speak. And at last she did; the red
lips parted, and out leaps her thought--and with such a guileless and
pretty enthusiasm, too: "Auntie, I just KNOW I've got five hundred fleas
on me!"

That was probably over the average. Yes, it must have been very much
over the average. The average at that time in the Grand Duchy of Baden
was forty-five to a young person (when alone), according to the official
estimate of the home secretary for that year; the average for older
people was shifty and indeterminable, for whenever a wholesome young
girl came into the presence of her elders she immediately lowered their
average and raised her own. She became a sort of contribution-box.

This dear young thing in the theater had been sitting there
unconscious