How simple, after all, was the created world on the stage to the real world in the auditorium, with its thousand complexities and dramatic situations, and if the little knot of players of parts for an hour could have had leisure to be spectators of the audience, what a deeper revelation of life would they not have seen!  For the world has never assembled such an epitome of itself, in its passion for pleasure and its passion for display, as in the modern opera, with its ranks and tiers of votaries from the pit to the dome.  I fancy that even Margaret, whose love for music was genuine, was almost as much fascinated by the greater spectacle as by the less.

It was a crowded night, for the opera was one that appealed to the senses and stimulated them to activity, and left the mind free to pursue its own schemes; in a word, orchestra and the scenes formed a sort of accompaniment and interpreter to the private dramas in the boxes.  The opera was made for society, and not society for the opera.  We occupied a box in the second tier—­the Morgans, Margaret, and my wife.  Morgan said that the glasses were raised to us from the parquet and leveled at us from the loges because we were a country party, but he well enough knew whose fresh beauty and enthusiastic young face it was that drew the fire when the curtain fell on the first act, and there was for a moment a little lull in the hum of conversation.

“I had heard,” Morgan was saying, “that the opera was not acclimated in New York; but it is nearly so.  The audience do not jabber so loud nor so incessantly as at San Carlo, and they do not hum the airs with the singers—­”

“Perhaps,” said my wife, “that is because they do not know the airs.”

“But they are getting on in cultivation, and learning how to assert the social side of the opera, which is not to be seriously interfered with by the music on the stage.”

“But the music, the scenery, were never before so good,” I replied to these cynical observations.

“That is true.  And the social side has risen with it.  Do you know what an impudent thing the managers did the other night in protesting against the raising of the lights by which the house was made brilliant and the cheap illusions of the stage were destroyed?  They wanted to make the house positively gloomy for the sake of a little artificial moonlight on the painted towers and the canvas lakes.”

As the world goes, the scene was brilliant, of course with republican simplicity.  The imagination was helped by no titled names any more than the eye was by the insignia of rank, but there was a certain glow of feeling, as the glass swept the circle, to know that there were ten millions in this box, and twenty in the next, and fifty in the next, attested well enough by the flash of jewels and the splendor of attire, and one might indulge a genuine pride in the prosperity of the republic.  As for beauty, the world, surely, in this later time, had flowered here —­flowered with something of Aspasia’s grace and something of the haughty coldness of Agrippina.  And yet it was American.  Here and there in the boxes was a thoroughbred portrait by Copley—­the long shapely neck, the sloping shoulders, the drooping eyelids, even to the gown in which the great-grandmother danced with the French officers.