“My heart sang more beautifully than the singers sang.  ’Now you have found it!  Now you have found it!’ my heart kept singing.

“When all the other people left I left too—­in a dream.  For it had passed into a dream—­into a beautiful dream that was going to shelter it for me forever.

“I stood around watching the beautiful people getting into their carriages.  And I couldn’t make myself believe that it was in the same world with Centralia.

“Then after a while it occurred to me that all those people were going home.  Everybody was going home.

“At first I wasn’t frightened.  Something inside me was singing over and over the songs of the opera.  I was too far in my dream to be much frightened.

“Then all at once I got—­oh, so tired.  And cold.  And so frightened I did not know what to do.  My dream seemed to have taken wings and flown away.  All the beautiful laughing people had gone.  It was just as if I woke up.  And I was on the strange streets all alone.  Only some noisy men who frightened me.

“I hid in a doorway till those men got by.  And then I saw a woman coming.  She was all alone, too.  She had on a dress that rustled and lovely white furs, and did not seem at all frightened.

“I stepped out and asked her to please tell me where to go for the night.

“Some time I’ll tell you about her, too.  Now I’ll just tell you that it ended with her taking me home with her to stay all night.  She made a lot of fun of me—­and said things to me I didn’t understand—­and swore at me—­and told me to ‘cut it’ and go back to the cornfields—­but I was crying then, and she took me with her.

“She kept up her queer kind of talk, but I was so tired that the minute I was in bed I went to sleep.

“The next morning she told me I had got to go back to the woods.  I said I would if there were any woods.  But there weren’t.  She laughed and said more queer things.  She asked me why I had come, and I told her.  First she laughed.  Then she sat there staring at me—­blinking.  And what she said was:  ‘Poor little fool.  Poor little greenhorn.’

“She asked me what I was going to do, and I said work, so I could stay there and go to the opera and see beautiful things.  She asked me what kind of a job I was figuring on and told me there was only one kind would let me in for that.  I asked her what it was and she said it was her line.  I asked her if she thought I was fitted for it, and she looked at me—­a look I didn’t understand at all—­and said she guessed the men she worked for would think so.  I asked her if she’d say a good word to them for me, and then she turned on me like a tiger and swore and said—­No, she hadn’t come to that!

“It was a case of knowing without knowing.  I was so green that I didn’t know.  And yet after a while I did.  As I look back on it I appreciate things I couldn’t appreciate then, thank her for things I didn’t know enough to thank her for at the time.