d a stimulating effect. She was
surprised to see so many men in the audience, and wondered how they
could leave their business in the afternoon. During the first number
Thea was so much interested in the orchestra itself, in the men, the
instruments, the volume of sound, that she paid little attention to what
they were playing. Her excitement impaired her power of listening. She
kept saying to herself, "Now I must stop this foolishness and listen; I
may never hear this again"; but her mind was like a glass that is hard
to focus. She was not ready to listen until the second number, Dvorak's
Symphony in E minor, called on the programme, "From the New World." The
first theme had scarcely been given out when her mind became clear;
instant composure fell upon her, and with it came the power of
concentration. This was music she could understand, music from the New
World indeed! Strange how, as the first movement went on, it brought
back to her that high tableland above Laramie; the grass-grown wagon
trails, the far-away peaks of the snowy range, the wind and the eagles,
that old man and the first telegraph message.

When the first movement ended, Thea's hands and feet were cold as ice.
She was too much excited to know anything except that she wanted
something desperately, and when the English horns gave out the theme of
the Largo, she knew that what she wanted was exactly that. Here were the
sand hills, the grasshoppers and locusts, all the things that wakened
and chirped in the early morning; the reaching and reaching of high
plains, the immeasurable yearning of all flat lands. There was home in
it, too; first memories, first mornings long ago; the amazement of a new
soul in a new world; a soul new and yet old, that had dreamed something
despairing, something glorious, in the dark before it was born; a soul
obsessed by what it did not know, under the cloud of a past it could not
recall.

If Thea had had much experience in concert-going, and had known her own
capacity, she would have left the hall when the symphony was over. But
she sat still, scarcely knowing where she was, because her mind had been
far away and had not yet come back to her. She was startled when the
orchestra began to play again--the entry of the gods into Walhalla. She
heard it as people hear things in their sleep. She knew scarcely
anything about the Wagner operas. She had a vague idea that "Rhinegold"
was about the strife between gods and men; she had r