beautiful locality, and by contrast
with it, even the garishness of the cheap New York theatre seemed fine
and glorious.

They had good seats in the first balcony, and here their guide had shown
his managerial ability again, for he had found it impossible, or said
so, to get all the seats together, so that he and the girl were in the
row in front and to one side of where the rest sat. Kitty did not like
the arrangement, and innocently suggested that her brother take her seat
while she went back to her mother. But her escort overruled her
objections easily, and laughed at her so frankly that from very shame
she could not urge them again, and they were soon forgotten in her
wonder at the mystery and glamour that envelops the home of the drama.
There was something weird to her in the alternate spaces of light and
shade. Without any feeling of its ugliness, she looked at the curtain as
at a door that should presently open between her and a house of wonders.
She looked at it with the fascination that one always experiences for
what either brings near or withholds the unknown.

As for Joe, he was not bothered by the mystery or the glamour of things.
But he had suddenly raised himself in his own estimation. He had gazed
steadily at a girl across the aisle until she had smiled in response. Of
course, he went hot and cold by turns, and the sweat broke out on his
brow, but instantly he began to swell. He had made a decided advance in
knowledge, and he swelled with the consciousness that already he was
coming to be a man of the world. He looked with a new feeling at the
swaggering, sporty young negroes. His attitude towards them was not one
of humble self-depreciation any more. Since last night he had grown,
and felt that he might, that he would, be like them, and it put a sort
of chuckling glee into his heart.

One might find it in him to feel sorry for this small-souled, warped
being, for he was so evidently the jest of Fate, if it were not that he
was so blissfully, so conceitedly, unconscious of his own nastiness.
Down home he had shaved the wild young bucks of the town, and while
doing it drunk in eagerly their unguarded narrations of their gay
exploits. So he had started out with false ideals as to what was fine
and manly. He was afflicted by a sort of moral and mental astigmatism
that made him see everything wrong. As he sat there to-night, he gave to
all he saw a wrong value and upon it based his ignorant desires.

Whe