mournful line: 'Optima dies... prima fugit.'

III

IN LINCOLN THE BEST part of the theatrical season came late, when the
good companies stopped off there for one-night stands, after their
long runs in New York and Chicago. That spring Lena went with me to
see Joseph Jefferson in 'Rip Van Winkle,' and to a war play called
'Shenandoah.' She was inflexible about paying for her own seat; said
she was in business now, and she wouldn't have a schoolboy spending
his money on her. I liked to watch a play with Lena; everything was
wonderful to her, and everything was true. It was like going to revival
meetings with someone who was always being converted. She handed her
feelings over to the actors with a kind of fatalistic resignation.
Accessories of costume and scene meant much more to her than to me.
She sat entranced through 'Robin Hood' and hung upon the lips of the
contralto who sang, 'Oh, Promise Me!'

Toward the end of April, the billboards, which I watched anxiously in
those days, bloomed out one morning with gleaming white posters on which
two names were impressively printed in blue Gothic letters: the name of
an actress of whom I had often heard, and the name 'Camille.'

I called at the Raleigh Block for Lena on Saturday evening, and we
walked down to the theatre. The weather was warm and sultry and put us
both in a holiday humour. We arrived early, because Lena liked to watch
the people come in. There was a note on the programme, saying that the
'incidental music' would be from the opera 'Traviata,' which was made
from the same story as the play. We had neither of us read the play, and
we did not know what it was about--though I seemed to remember having
heard it was a piece in which great actresses shone. 'The Count of Monte
Cristo,' which I had seen James O'Neill play that winter, was by the
only Alexandre Dumas I knew. This play, I saw, was by his son, and I
expected a family resemblance. A couple of jack-rabbits, run in off the
prairie, could not have been more innocent of what awaited them than
were Lena and I.

Our excitement began with the rise of the curtain, when the moody
Varville, seated before the fire, interrogated Nanine. Decidedly, there
was a new tang about this dialogue. I had never heard in the theatre
lines that were alive, that presupposed and took for granted, like those
which passed between Varville and Marguerite in the brief encounter
before her friends entered. This introduced the m