have said down home.  There was a difference, however, which she recognised.  Thomas was not the provincial who puts every one on a par with himself, nor was he the metropolitan who complacently patronises the whole world.  He was trained out of the one and not up to the other.  The intermediate only succeeded in being offensive.  Mrs. Jones’ assurance as to her guest’s fine qualities did not do all that might have been expected to reassure Mrs. Hamilton in the face of the difficulties of the gentleman’s manner.

She could not, however, lay her finger on any particular point that would give her the reason for rejecting his friendly advances.  She got ready the next evening to go to the theatre with the rest.  Mr. Thomas at once possessed himself of Kitty and walked on ahead, leaving Joe to accompany his mother and Mrs. Jones,—­an arrangement, by the way, not altogether to that young gentleman’s taste.  A good many men bowed to Thomas in the street, and they turned to look enviously after him.  At the door of the theatre they had to run the gantlet of a dozen pairs of eyes.  Here, too, the party’s guide seemed to be well known, for some one said, before they passed out of hearing, “I wonder who that little light girl is that Thomas is with to-night?  He ’s a hot one for you.”

Mrs. Hamilton had been in a theatre but once before in her life, and Joe and Kit but a few times oftener.  On those occasions they had sat far up in the peanut gallery in the place reserved for people of colour.  This was not a pleasant, cleanly, nor beautiful locality, and by contrast with it, even the garishness of the cheap New York theatre seemed fine and glorious.

They had good seats in the first balcony, and here their guide had shown his managerial ability again, for he had found it impossible, or said so, to get all the seats together, so that he and the girl were in the row in front and to one side of where the rest sat.  Kitty did not like the arrangement, and innocently suggested that her brother take her seat while she went back to her mother.  But her escort overruled her objections easily, and laughed at her so frankly that from very shame she could not urge them again, and they were soon forgotten in her wonder at the mystery and glamour that envelops the home of the drama.  There was something weird to her in the alternate spaces of light and shade.  Without any feeling of its ugliness, she looked at the curtain as at a door that should presently open between her and a house of wonders.  She looked at it with the fascination that one always experiences for what either brings near or withholds the unknown.

As for Joe, he was not bothered by the mystery or the glamour of things.  But he had suddenly raised himself in his own estimation.  He had gazed steadily at a girl across the aisle until she had smiled in response.  Of course, he went hot and cold by turns, and the sweat broke out on his brow, but instantly he began to swell.  He had made a decided advance in knowledge, and he swelled with the consciousness that already he was coming to be a man of the world.  He looked with a new feeling at the swaggering, sporty young negroes.  His attitude towards them was not one of humble self-depreciation any more.  Since last night he had grown, and felt that he might, that he would, be like them, and it put a sort of chuckling glee into his heart.