eh?"

He wheeled about and stood again looking at Carmen, until she blushed
under his close gaze and turned her head away. Then he went back to
his box. But throughout the evening, whenever the girl looked in the
direction of the Ames family, she met the steady, piercing gaze of the
man's keen gray eyes. And they seemed to her like sharp steel points,
cutting into the portals of her soul.

Night after night during the long season Carmen sat in the box and
studied the operas that were produced on the boards before her
wondering gaze. Always Mrs. Hawley-Crowles was with her. And
generally, too, the young heir of Altern was there, occupying the
chair next to the girl--which was quite as the solicitous Mrs.
Hawley-Crowles had planned.

"Aw--deucedly fine show to-night, Miss Carmen," the youth ventured one
evening, as he took his accustomed place close to her.

"The music is always beautiful," the girl responded. "But the play,
like most of Grand Opera, is drawn from the darkest side of human
life. It is a sordid picture of licentiousness and cruelty. Only for
its setting in wonderful music, Grand Opera is generally such a
depiction of sex-passion, of lust and murder, that it would not be
permitted on the stage. A few years from now people will be horrified
to remember that the preceding generation reveled in such blood
scenes--just as we now speak with horror of the gladiatorial contests
in ancient Rome."

The young man regarded her uncertainly. "But--aw--Miss Carmen," he
hazarded, "we must be true to life, you know!" Having delivered
himself of this oracular statement, the youth adjusted his monocle and
settled back as if he had given finality to a weighty argument.

The girl looked at him pityingly. "You voice the cant of the modern
writer, 'true lo life.' True to the horrible, human sense of life,
that looks no higher than the lust of blood, and is satisfied with it,
I admit. True to the unreal, temporal sense of existence, that is here
to-day, and to-morrow has gone out in the agony of self-imposed
suffering and death. True to that awful, false sense of life which we
must put off if we would ever rise into the consciousness of _real_
life, I grant you. But the production of these horrors on the stage,
even in a framework of marvelous music, serves only to hold before us
the awful models from which we must turn if we would hew out a better
existence. Are you the better for seeing an exhibition of wanton
murder o