on a contemporaneous mood
or fad, and satirizes it; but the Italian opera at its lightest deals
with a principle of human nature, and it is never satirical; it needn't
be, for it is as independent of the morals as of the reasons. It isn't
obliged, by the terms of its existence, to teach, any more than it is
obliged to convince. It's the most absolute thing in the world; and from
its unnatural height it can stoop at will in moments of enrapturing
naturalness without ever losing poise. Wasn't that delightful where
Caruso hesitated about his encore, and then, with a shrug and a waft of
his left hand to the house, went off in order to come back and give his
aria with more effect? That was a touch of naturalness not in the scheme
of the opera."

"Yes, but it was more racial, more personal, than natural. It was
delicious, but we are not sure we approved of it."

"Ah, in Italian opera you're not asked to approve; you're only desired
to enjoy!"

"Well, then that bit of racial personality was of the effect of
actuality, and it jarred."

"Perhaps you're right," the reader sighed, but he added: "It was
charming; yes, it made itself part of the piece. Nemorino would have
done just as Caruso did."

At the last fall of the curtain the reader and the writer rose in
unison, a drop of that full tide of life which ebbed by many channels
out of the vast auditorium, and in two or three minutes left it dry.
They stayed in their duplex personality to glance at the silken
evanescences from the boxes, and then, being in the mood for the best
society, they joined the shining presences in the vestibule where these
waited for their carriages and automobiles. Of this company the
interlocutors felt themselves so inseparably part that they could with
difficulty externate themselves so far as to observe that it was of the
quality of "the town" which had gone to Italian opera from the first.

In Mr. Spectator's time the town would have been lighted by the smoky
torches of linkboys to its chairs; now it was called to its electric
autos in the blaze of a hundred incandescent bulbs; but the difference
was not enough to break the tradition. There was something in the aspect
of that patrician throng, as it waited the turn of each, which struck
the reader and writer jointly as a novel effect from any American crowd,
but which the writer scarcely dares intimate to the general reader, for
the general reader is much more than generally a woman, and she