out. She questioned me absently about various
changes in the city, but she was chiefly concerned that she had forgotten
to leave instructions about feeding half-skimmed milk to a certain
weakling calf, "old Maggie's calf, you know, Clark," she explained,
evidently having forgotten how long I had been away. She was further
troubled because she had neglected to tell her daughter about the
freshly-opened kit of mackerel in the cellar, which would spoil if it
were not used directly.

I asked her whether she had ever heard any of the Wagnerian operas, and
found that she had not, though she was perfectly familiar with their
respective situations, and had once possessed the piano score of _The
Flying Dutchman_. I began to think it would be best to get her back to
Red Willow 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
her queer, country clothes, 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. 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.

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 colour 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 colours 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, p