ve friends."

"Why not?"

"Why, there isn't hardly one of 'em as would have the pluck to hold a
pistol, and not one as would have the money to buy one."

"Well, don't say I never told you."

"You and your friends' pistols!"

With the pride and insolence of maiden youth, Jenny took the London
streets. Through the transient April rains she came from Islington to
Covent Garden every day. From King's Cross she rode on the green omnibus
that jogged by the budding elms of Brunswick Square. Down Guilford
Street she rode and watched its frail inhabitants coming home with their
parcels of ribbons and laces. Through Great Queen Street into Long Acre
she came, sitting along on the front seat of the green omnibus more like
a rosy lily now than a La France rose--down Long Acre till she came to
Bow Street, through which she would run to the theater past the groups
of porters who nodded and smiled at her, for they soon recognized the
swift one running through the April rains.

Italian opera appealed to Jenny most. She did not care greatly for
"Tannhaeuser," thinking the Venusberg ballet very poor and Venus herself
a sight. Teutonic extravagance affected her with a slight sense of
discomfort as of being placed too near trombones. Her training as a
dancer had begotten a feeling of meticulous form which the expansive
harmonies of Wagner disconcerted. Jenny did not enjoy suffering a
sea-change. Novelty and strangeness were to her merely peculiar. Strauss
would have bored her, not as Brahms might have bored her to somnolence,
but as an irritating personality bores one to rudeness or sudden flight.
To speculate how far it might have been advisable to hang her
intelligence with Gothic tapestries is not worth while. Probably the
imposition of decorated barbarism on her lucid and sensitive enjoyment
of Verdi would have obscured the small windows of her soul with gloomy
arras. Notwithstanding her education at the board school, she had a
view, and it was better she should preserve an instinct for a sanity
that was sometimes pathos rather than, in the acquirement of an
epileptic appreciation, she should lose what was, after all, a classical
feeling in her sensuous love of obvious beauty.

The sugar-plums of Italian opera melted innocently in her mouth, leaving
behind them nothing but a memory of sweetness, as one steps from a
garden of shaded bird-song with a thought of music. Wagner was more
intoxicating, but bequeathed no limpid exultat