“Then you got a good dose of Wagner, I suppose?” said March.

“What?” asked the girl.

“I don’t think Miss Dryfoos is very fond of Wagner’s music,” Mrs. Mandel said.  “I believe you are all great Wagnerites in Boston?”

“I’m a very bad Bostonian, Mrs. Mandel.  I suspect myself of preferring Verdi,” March answered.

Miss Dryfoos looked down at her fan again, and said, “I like ‘Trovatore’ the best.”

“It’s an opera I never get tired of,” said March, and Mrs. March and Mrs:  Mandel exchanged a smile of compassion for his simplicity.  He detected it, and added:  “But I dare say I shall come down with the Wagner fever in time.  I’ve been exposed to some malignant cases of it.”

“That night we were there,” said Miss Mela, “they had to turn the gas down all through one part of it, and the papers said the ladies were awful mad because they couldn’t show their diamonds.  I don’t wonder, if they all had to pay as much for their boxes as we did.  We had to pay sixty dollars.”  She looked at the Marches for their sensation at this expense.

March said:  “Well, I think I shall take my box by the month, then.  It must come cheaper, wholesale.”

“Oh no, it don’t,” said the girl, glad to inform him.  “The people that own their boxes, and that had to give fifteen or twenty thousand dollars apiece for them, have to pay sixty dollars a night whenever there’s a performance, whether they go or not.”

“Then I should go every night,” March said.

“Most of the ladies were low neck—­”

March interposed, “Well, I shouldn’t go low-neck.”

The girl broke into a fondly approving laugh at his drolling.  “Oh, I guess you love to train!  Us girls wanted to go low neck, too; but father said we shouldn’t, and mother said if we did she wouldn’t come to the front of the box once.  Well, she didn’t, anyway.  We might just as well ‘a’ gone low neck.  She stayed back the whole time, and when they had that dance—­the ballet, you know—­she just shut her eyes.  Well, Conrad didn’t like that part much, either; but us girls and Mrs. Mandel, we brazened it out right in the front of the box.  We were about the only ones there that went high neck.  Conrad had to wear a swallow-tail; but father hadn’t any, and he had to patch out with a white cravat.  You couldn’t see what he had on in the back o’ the box, anyway.”

Mrs. March looked at Miss Dryfoos, who was waving her fan more and more slowly up and down, and who, when she felt herself looked at, returned Mrs. March’s smile, which she meant to be ingratiating and perhaps sympathetic, with a flash that made her start, and then ran her fierce eyes over March’s face.  “Here comes mother,” she said, with a sort of breathlessness, as if speaking her thought aloud, and through the open door the Marches could see the old lady on the stairs.

She paused half-way down, and turning, called up:  “Coonrod!  Coonrod!  You bring my shawl down with you.”