one evening;
our story continues by night. The box was large and important, near the
stage. Josephine and Julia were there, with Robert and Jim--also two
more men. The women sat in the front of the box, conspicuously. They
were both poor, they were rather excited. But they belonged to a set
which looked on social triumphs as a downfall that one allows oneself.
The two men, Lilly and Struthers, were artists, the former literary, the
latter a painter. Lilly sat by Josephine in the front of the box: he was
her little lion of the evening.

Few women can sit in the front of a big box, on a crowded and full-swing
opera night, without thrilling and dilating. There is an intoxication in
being thus thrust forward, conspicuous and enhanced, right in the eye of
the vast crowd that lines the hollow shell of the auditorium. Thus even
Josephine and Julia leaned their elbows and poised their heads regally,
looking condescendingly down upon the watchful world. They were two poor
women, having nothing to do with society. Half bohemians.

Josephine was an artist. In Paris she was a friend of a very fashionable
dressmaker and decorator, master of modern elegance. Sometimes she
designed dresses for him, and sometimes she accepted from him a
commission to decorate a room. Usually at her last sou, it gave her
pleasure to dispose of costly and exquisite things for other people, and
then be rid of them.

This evening her dress was a simple, but a marvellously poised thing of
black and silver: in the words of the correct journal. With her tight,
black, bright hair, her arched brows, her dusky-ruddy face and her bare
shoulders; her strange equanimity, her long, slow, slanting looks; she
looked foreign and frightening, clear as a cameo, but dark, far off.
Julia was the English beauty, in a lovely blue dress. Her hair was
becomingly untidy on her low brow, her dark blue eyes wandered and got
excited, her nervous mouth twitched. Her high-pitched, sing-song voice
and her hurried laugh could be heard in the theatre. She twisted a
beautiful little fan that a dead artist had given her.

Not being fashionable, they were in the box when the overture began. The
opera was Verdi--_Aida_. If it is impossible to be in an important box
at the opera without experiencing the strange intoxication of social
pre-eminence, it is just as impossible to be there without some feeling
of horror at the sight the stage presents.

Josephine leaned her elbow and looked