martyrdom. Thus on the Saturday morning after nine days of
happy idleness when Kathleen was awakening in her an uneasy sense of her
obligation to her little sisters (that name always brought up a picture
of Ellen battling for her through heat and cold), a note from Dick,
inviting her to go to the opera with him that evening, blotted out the
little sisters and the cold. She told Kathleen of the invitation only to
receive a lecture on the inequalities of this world. Hertha felt
aggrieved. Certainly she had waited many years for this, her first
opera, and she believed she had a right to it when it came.

It was not far to the great department store where she had wandered for
many noon hours, and, with a sense of delightful importance, she entered
the shop and purchased a shirtwaist--not of cotton like those she had
helped manufacture, but of filmy silk. This, with a pair of white
gloves, cost a week's earnings, but life to-day was not measured by
wages. At home again, she got her own luncheon, for Kathleen was away
for the day, and spent the afternoon in bed, dozing and day-dreaming and
dozing again. She felt that she understood why rich people were lazy,
but wondered whether an afternoon in bed would bring happiness unless
many other afternoons and mornings had been spent in difficult toil.

"Gee," cried Richard Brown as, seated by him in the balcony of the opera
house, she took off her hat and coat, "I ought to take a back seat
to-night and get one of those swallow-tailed fellows downstairs to come
up here by you."

Hertha smiled a negative to his suggestion, wishing nevertheless that
his taste in neckties was a little less flamboyant and that he did not
talk so loud. She determined however not to notice these things, and
they discussed,--she, gently, he, with jovial outbursts,--the building,
the audience and the opera that they were about to witness. Dick had
bought the libretto, "Il Trovatore," but neither of them knew what was
before them. He had seen a musical comedy or two but she was ignorant of
every form of operatic music. Reading the plot to her companion she
found him chagrined that he had come to a tragedy. "Shucks!" he
exclaimed when she had finished, "I thought I was bringing you to
something funny." Her assurance that this would be interesting and that
she liked a sad story brought back his spirits. He chaffed her about her
dress and her new gloves, until she was glad when the overture began and
they wer