It came out in the talk that Mr. Lyon had been in Washington for a week, and would return there later on.

“We had a claim on him,” said Mrs. Eschelle, “for his kindness to us in London, and we are trying to convince him that New York is the real capital.”

“Unfortunately,” added Miss Eschelle, looking up in Mr. Lyon’s face, “he visited Brandon first, and you seem to have bewitched him with your simple country ways.  I can get him to talk of nothing else.”

“You mean to say,” Mr. Lyon replied, with the air of retorting, “that you have asked me about nothing else.”

“Oh, you know we felt a little responsible for you; and there is no place so dangerous as the country.  Now here you are protected—­we put all the wickedness on the stage, and learn to recognize and shun it.”

“It may be wicked,” said her mother, “but it is dull.  Don’t you find it so, Mr. Henderson?  I am passionately fond of Wagner, but it is too noisy for anything tonight.”

“I notice, dear,” the dutiful daughter replied for all of us, “that you have to raise your voice.  But there is the ballet.  Let us all listen now.”

Mr. Lyon excused himself from going with me, saying that he would call at our hotel, and I took Henderson.  “I shall count the minutes you are going to lose,” the girl said as we went out-to our box.  The lobbies in the interact were thronged with men—­for the most part the young speculators of the Chamber turned into loungers in the foyer—­knowing, alert, attitudinizing in the extreme of the mode, unable even in this hour to give beauty the preference to business, well knowing, perhaps, that beauty itself in these days has a fine eye for business.

I liked Henderson better in our box than in his own.  Was it because the atmosphere was more natural and genuine?  Or was it Margaret’s transparent nature, her sincere enjoyment of the scene, her evident pleasure in the music, the color, the gayety of the house, that made him drop the slight cynical air of the world which had fitted him so admirably a moment before?  He already knew my wife and the Morgans, and, after the greetings were made, he took a seat by Margaret, quite content while the act was going on to watch its progress in the play of her responsive features.  How quickly she felt, how the frown followed the smile, how, she seemed to weigh and try to apprehend the meaning of what went on—­how her every sense enjoyed life!

“It is absurd,” she said, turning her bright face to him when the curtain dropped, “to be so interested in fictitious trouble.”

“I’m not so sure that it is,” he replied, in her own tone; “the opera is a sort of pulpit, and not seldom preaches an awful sermon—­more plainly than the preacher dares to make it.”

“But not in nomine Dei.”

“No.  But who can say what is most effective?  I often wonder, as I watch the congregations coming from the churches on the Avenue, if they are any more solemnized than the audiences that pour out of this house.  I confess that I cannot shake off ‘Lohengrin’ in a good while after I hear it.”