mounted above the parterre boxes and the grand-tier boxes, to the
highest and cheapest of the galleries where silence and an almost awed
concentration reigned. And there, when the lights came on again, he saw
a slender figure in a chair near him, leaning forward with her chin
resting on her hand, in an absolute fervor of interest. It was Miss
Terroll and again she was alone. Once more she impressed him as someone
purring with pleasure, and when the performance ended he found himself
on the sidewalk whimsically waiting for her to come down from her dollar
seat, among the gallery gods.

When he caught sight of her, she was slipping as quietly and
unobtrusively through the crowds of jewelled and fur-wrapped women and
men in evening-dress as though she were a mouse vanishing from a hall
of banqueting, to which she had surreptitiously crept for her crumb. She
did not look at the people about her. She did not seem to see them, for
her eyes were still languorous with memories of Tristan and Isolde. As
Paul touched her arm, she started and he hastened to say: "My car is
here. Won't you let me drive you down-town?"

She let him lead her to his machine and lay back dreamily against the
cushions, as they shot down the avenue between twin threads of electric
opals.

For a while they talked of the opera, of the music and the voices, and
the musician found himself expanding with a warmth of appreciative
contentment, because he had a companion whose understanding and
enthusiasm kept step with his own, and a step like that of a classic
dance, attuned to harmonies.

He found himself often coming with a sort of start to the realization of
a discovery under whose influence he tingled. Theoretically he knew that
in this city, in whose varying meeting places of extremes the unexpected
was to be expected, one should never be astonished. He knew there were
artists who shunned Bohemia, and once he had met a barber whose
enthusiasms were all for cuneiform inscriptions. He had heard in a club
of a hobo whose nails were clean, whose address was elegant and who had
confounded surgeons on surgery, artists on art, poets on verse and
theologues on theology. He knew that the circles which had soothed his
artistic snobbery with an admiration as grateful as soft fingers on a
cat's back held no letters patent on charm or cultivation and yet his
own mind had catalogued women of the stage, off-stage, under a general
heading, in some way associated wit