w! Ten rows in a case an' 'bout a t'ousand cases!
What deh blazes use is dem?"
Evenings during the week he took her to see plays in which the
brain-clutching heroine was rescued from the palatial home of her
guardian, who is cruelly after her bonds, by the hero with the
beautiful sentiments. The latter spent most of his time out at soak in
pale-green snow storms, busy with a nickel-plated revolver, rescuing
aged strangers from villains.
Maggie lost herself in sympathy with the wanderers swooning in snow
storms beneath happy-hued church windows. And a choir within singing
"Joy to the World." To Maggie and the rest of the audience this was
transcendental realism. Joy always within, and they, like the actor,
inevitably without. Viewing it, they hugged themselves in ecstatic
pity of their imagined or real condition.
The girl thought the arrogance and granite-heartedness of the magnate
of the play was very accurately drawn. She echoed the maledictions
that the occupants of the gallery showered on this individual when his
lines compelled him to expose his extreme selfishness.
Shady persons in the audience revolted from the pictured villainy of
the drama. With untiring zeal they hissed vice and applauded virtue.
Unmistakably bad men evinced an apparently sincere admiration for
virtue.
The loud gallery was overwhelmingly with the unfortunate and the
oppressed. They encouraged the struggling hero with cries, and jeered
the villain, hooting and calling attention to his whiskers. When
anybody died in the pale-green snow storms, the gallery mourned. They
sought out the painted misery and hugged it as akin.
In the hero's erratic march from poverty in the first act, to wealth
and triumph in the final one, in which he forgives all the enemies that
he has left, he was assisted by the gallery, which applauded his
generous and noble sentiments and confounded the speeches of his
opponents by making irrelevant but very sharp remarks. Those actors
who were cursed with villainy parts were confronted at every turn by
the gallery. If one of them rendered lines containing the most subtile
distinctions between right and wrong, the gallery was immediately aware
if the actor meant wickedness, and denounced him accordingly.
The last act was a triumph for the hero, poor and of the masses, the
representative of the audience, over the villain and the rich man, his
pockets stuffed with bonds, his heart packed with tyrannical
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