erhaps, a wholesale debutante
tea crush. A Friday afternoon ticket is as impossible of attainment for
one not a subscriber as a seat in heaven for a sinner. Saturday night's
audience is staider, more masculine, less staccato. Gallery, balcony,
parquet, it represents the city's best. Its men prefer Beethoven to
Berlin. Its women could wear pearl necklaces, and don't. Between the
audience and the solemn black-and-white rows on the platform there
exists an entente cordiale. The Konzert-Meister bows to his friend in
the third row, as he tucks his violin under his chin. The fifth row,
aisle, smiles and nods to the sausage-fingered 'cellist.

"Fritz is playing well to-night."

In a rarefied form, it is the atmosphere that existed between audience
and players in the days of the old and famous Daly stock company.

Such was the character of the audience Theodore was to face on his first
appearance in America. Fanny explained its nature to him. He shrugged
his shoulders in a gesture as German as it was expressive.

Theodore seemed to have become irrevocably German during the years of
his absence from America. He had a queer stock of little foreign tricks.
He lifted his hat to men acquaintances on the street. He had learned to
smack his heels smartly together and to bow stiffly from the waist,
and to kiss the hand of the matrons--and they adored him for it. He was
quite innocent of pose in these things. He seemed to have imbibed
them, together with his queer German haircut, and his incredibly German
clothes.

Fanny allowed him to retain the bow, and the courtly hand-kiss, but she
insisted that he change the clothes and the haircut.

"You'll have to let it grow, Ted. I don't mean that I want you to have a
mane, like Ysaye. But I do think you ought to discard that convict
cut. Besides, it isn't becoming. And if you're going to be an American
violinist you'll have to look it--with a foreign finish." He let his
hair grow. Fanny watched with interest for the appearance of the unruly
lock which had been wont to straggle over his white forehead in
his schoolboy days. The new and well-cut American clothes effected
surprisingly little change. Fanny, surveying him, shook her head.

"When you stepped off the ship you looked like a German in German
clothes. Now you look like a German in American clothes. I don't know--I
do believe it's your face, Ted. I wouldn't have thought that ten years
or so in any country could change the shape of