, 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 theater. The weather was warm and sultry and put us both in a
holiday humor. 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 theater 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 most brilliant, worldly, the most
enchantingly gay scene I had ever looked upon. I had never seen champagne
bottles opened on the stage before--indeed, I had never seen them opened
anywhere. The memory of that supper makes me hungry now; the sight of it
then, when I had only a students' boarding-house dinner behind me, was
delicate torment. I seem to remember gilded chairs and tables (arranged
hurriedly by footmen in white gloves and stockings), linen of dazzling
whiteness, glittering glass, silver dishes, a great bowl of fruit, and the
reddest of roses. The room was invaded by beautiful women and dashing
young men, laughing and talking together. The men were dressed more or
less after the period in which the play was written; the women were not. I
saw no inconsistency. Their talk seemed to open to one the brilliant world
in which they lived; every sentence made one older and wiser, every
pleasan