As well think of the simulated trees, water-falls, and chateaux leaving the stage, as the dugazon!  One always imagines them singing on into dimness, dustiness, unsteadiness, and uselessness, until, like any other piece of stage property, they are at last put aside and simply left there at the end of some season—­there seems to be a superstition against selling or burning useless and dilapidated stage property.  As it came to me, the idea was not an impossibility.  The last representation of the season is over.  She, tired beyond judgment—­haply, beyond feeling—­by her tireless role, sinks upon her chair to rest in her dressing-room; sinks, further, to sleep.  She has no maid.  The troupe, hurrying away to France on the special train waiting not half a dozen blocks away, forget her—­the insignificant are so easily forgotten!  The porter, more tired, perhaps, than any one of the beautiful ideal world about him, and savoring already in advance the good onion-flavored grillade awaiting him at home, locks up everything fast and tight; the tighter and faster for the good fortnight’s vacation he has promised himself.

No doubt if the old opera-house were ever cleaned out, just such a heap of stiff, wire-strung bones would be found, in some such hole as the dugazon’s dressing-room, desiccating away in its last costume—­perhaps in that very costume of Inez; and if one were venturesome enough to pass Allhallowe’en there, the spirit of those bones might be seen availing itself of the privilege of unasperged corpses to roam.  Not singing, not talking—­it is an anachronism to say that ghosts talk:  their medium of communication must be pure thought; and one should be able to see their thoughts working, just as one sees the working of the digestive organs in the clear viscera of transparent animalcule.  The hard thing of it is that ghosts are chained to the same scenes that chained their bodies, and when they sleep-walk, so to speak, it must be through phases of former existence.  What a nightmare for them to go over once again the lived and done, the suffered and finished!  What a comfort to wake up and find one’s self dead, well dead!

I could have continued and put the whole opera troupe in “costume de ghost,” but I think it was the woman’s eyes that drew me back to her face and her story.  She had a sensible face, now that I observed her naturally, as it were; and her hands,—­how I have agonized over those hands on the stage!—­all knuckles and exaggerated veins, clutching her dress as she sang, or, petrified, outstretched to Leonore’s “Pourquoi ces larmes?”—­her hands were the hands of an honest, hard-working woman who buckrams her own skirts, and at need could scrub her own floor.  Her face (my description following my wandering glance)—­her face was careworn, almost to desuetude; not dissipation-worn, as, alas! the faces of the more gifted ladies of opera troupes too often are.  There was no fattening