o had danced to fame on his crooked legs; Mrs.
Fiske, most incomparable Becky; Mansfield, Sothern--some of them, alas,
already gods of yesterday!

At first there had been matinees with her mother--"The Little
Princess," over whose sorrows she had wept in the harrowing first act,
having to be consoled with chocolates and the promise of brighter
things as the play progressed.

Now and then she had come with Hilda. But never when she could help
it. "I'd rather stay at home," she had told her father.

"But--why--?"

"Because she laughs in the wrong places."

Her father never laughed in the wrong places, and he squeezed her hand
in those breathless moments where words would have been desecration,
and wiped his eyes frankly when his feelings were stirred.

"There is no one like you, Daddy," she had told him, "to enjoy things."
And so it had come about that he had pushed away his work on certain
nights and, sitting beside her, had forgotten the sordid and suffering
world which he knew so well, and which she knew not at all.

As her eyes swept the house, they rested at last with a rather puzzled
look on a stout old gentleman with a wide shirt-front, who sat in the
right-hand box. He had white hair and a red face.

Where had she seen him?

There were women in the box, a sparkling company in white and silver,
and black and diamonds, and green and gold. There was a big
bald-headed man, and quite in the shadow back of them all, a slender
youth.

It was when the slender youth leaned forward to speak to the vision in
white and silver that Jean stared and stared again.

She knew now where she had seen the old gentleman with the wide shirt
front. He was the shabby old gentleman of the Toy Shop! And the youth
was the shabby son!

Yet here they were in state and elegance! As if a fairy godmother had
waved a wand--!

The curtain went up on a feverish little slavey with her mind set on
going to the ball, on Our Policeman wanting a shave, on the orphans in
boxes, on baked potato offered as hospitality by a half-starved
hostess, on a waiting Cinderella asleep on a frozen doorstep.

And then the ball--and Mona Lisa, and the Duchess of Devonshire, and
The Girl with the Pitcher and the Girl with the Muff--and Cinderella in
azure tulle and cloth-of-gold, dancing with the Prince at the end like
mad--.

Then the bell boomed--the lights went out--and after a little moment,
one saw Cinderella, stripped of her finery, stagg