Bertha was visiting her aunt’s home in the East.  She had been very restless and capricious just before she went.  All women were thus, he supposed.  But he missed her.

CHAPTER LXXVIII

THE FATEFUL MORN

On the evening of April 17, 1906, Frank and Bertha, who had recently returned, attended the opera.  The great Caruso, whose tenor voice had taken the East by storm, and whose salary was reputed to be fabulous, had come at last to San Francisco.  Fremsted, almost equally famous, was singing with him in “Carmen” at the Grand Opera House.  All the town turned out in broadcloth, diamonds, silks and decollete to hear them—­a younger generation of San Franciscans assuming a bit uncomfortably that social importance which had not yet become genealogically sure of itself.

Frank and Bertha drove down in the electric brougham, for which they had with difficulty found a place along the vehicle-lined curb of Mission street.  And, as they were early, they halted in the immense and handsome, though old-fashioned, foyer to observe the crowd.  The air was heavy with perfume.

“Look at that haughty dame with a hundred-thousand dollar necklace,” he smiled.  “One would have thought her father was at least a king.  Forty years ago he drove a dray....  And that one with the ermine coat and priceless tiara.  Wouldn’t you take her for a princess?  Ah, well, more power to her!  But her mother cleaned soiled linen in Washerwoman’s Lagoon and her dad renovated cuspidors, swept floors in the Bella Union.”

But the girl did not seem interested.  “I wonder,” she remarked a little later, “why it makes so very much—­ah—­difference ... who one’s parents were?”

There was a curious, half-detached sadness in her tone.  Frank wondered suddenly if he had blundered.  Bertha had never mentioned her parents.  He vaguely understood that they had died abroad and had foreborne to question, fearing to arouse some tragic memory.

“Of course, it really doesn’t matter,” he said hastily; “it’s only when people put on airs that I think of such things.”  She took his arm with fingers that trembled slightly.  “Let us go in.  The overture is beginning.”

During an intermission she whispered.  “I wish I were like Carmen—­bold enough to fight the world for lo—­for what I wanted.”

“Aren’t you?” he turned and looked at her.

“No, sometimes I’m overwhelmed ... feel as though I can’t look life in the face.”  He saw that her lips were trembling, that her eyes were winking back the tears.

“What is it, dear?” he questioned.  But she did not answer.  The curtain rose upon the final act.

Silently they moved out with a throng whose silk skirts swished and rustled.  The men were restless, glad of a chance at the open and a smoke; the women gay, exalted, half intoxicated by the musical appeal to their emotions.  There was an atmosphere almost of hysteria in the great swiftly emptying auditorium.