low County without waking her, and regretted having
suggested the concert.

From the time we entered the concert hall, however, she was a trifle
less passive and inert, and for the first time seemed to perceive her
surroundings. I had felt some trepidation lest she might become aware
of the absurdities of her attire, or might experience some painful
embarrassment at stepping suddenly into the world to which she had been
dead for a quarter of a century. But, again, I found how superficially
I had judged her. She sat looking about her with eyes as impersonal,
almost as stony, as those with which the granite Rameses in a
museum watches the froth and fret that ebbs and flows about his
pedestal-separated from it by the lonely stretch of centuries. I have
seen this same aloofness in old miners who drift into the Brown Hotel at
Denver, their pockets full of bullion, their linen soiled, their haggard
faces unshaven; standing in the thronged corridors as solitary as though
they were still in a frozen camp on the Yukon, conscious that certain
experiences have isolated them from their fellows by a gulf no
haberdasher could bridge.

We sat at the extreme left of the first balcony, facing the arch of our
own and the balcony above us, veritable hanging gardens, brilliant as
tulip beds. The matinee audience was made up chiefly of women. One
lost the contour of faces and figures--indeed, any effect of line
whatever-and there was only the color of bodices past counting, the
shimmer of fabrics soft and firm, silky and sheer: red, mauve, pink,
blue, lilac, purple, ecru, rose, yellow, cream, and white, all the
colors that an impressionist finds in a sunlit landscape, with here and
there the dead shadow of a frock coat. My Aunt Georgiana regarded them
as though they had been so many daubs of tube-paint on a palette.

When the musicians came out and took their places, she gave a little
stir of anticipation and looked with quickening interest down over the
rail at that invariable grouping, perhaps the first wholly familiar
thing that had greeted her eye since she had left old Maggie and her
weakling calf. I could feel how all those details sank into her soul,
for I had not forgotten how they had sunk into mine when I came fresh
from plowing forever and forever between green aisles of corn, where, as
in a treadmill, one might walk from daybreak to dusk without perceiving
a shadow of change. The clean profiles of the musicians, the gloss of