It was not often that she came to the play stirred to her heart’s core by actualities.  To-day a low song of longing had been set singing in her heart by the finery, the merriment, the beauty she had seen.  Oh, these women who had passed her by, hundreds and hundreds strong, who were they?  Whence came the rich, elegant dresses, the astonishingly colored buttons, the knick-knacks of silver and gold?  Where were these lovely creatures housed?  Amid what elegancies of carved furniture, decorated walls, elaborate tapestries did they move?  Where were their rich apartments, loaded with all that money could provide?  In what stables champed these sleek, nervous horses and rested the gorgeous carriages?  Where lounged the richly groomed footmen?  Oh, the mansions, the lights, the perfume, the loaded boudoirs and tables!  New York must be filled with such bowers, or the beautiful, insolent, supercilious creatures could not be.  Some hothouses held them.  It ached her to know that she was not one of them—­that, alas, she had dreamed a dream and it had not come true.  She wondered at her own solitude these two years past—­her indifference to the fact that she had never achieved what she had expected.

The play was one of those drawing-room concoctions in which charmingly overdressed ladies and gentlemen suffer the pangs of love and jealousy amid gilded surroundings.  Such bon-mots are ever enticing to those who have all their days longed for such material surroundings and have never had them gratified.  They have the charm of showing suffering under ideal conditions.  Who would not grieve upon a gilded chair?  Who would not suffer amid perfumed tapestries, cushioned furniture, and liveried servants?  Grief under such circumstances becomes an enticing thing.  Carrie longed to be of it.  She wanted to take her sufferings, whatever they were, in such a world, or failing that, at least to simulate them under such charming conditions upon the stage.  So affected was her mind by what she had seen, that the play now seemed an extraordinarily beautiful thing.  She was soon lost in the world it represented, and wished that she might never return.  Between the acts she studied the galaxy of matinee attendants in front rows and boxes, and conceived a new idea of the possibilities of New York.  She was sure she had not seen it all—­that the city was one whirl of pleasure and delight.

Going out, the same Broadway taught her a sharper lesson.  The scene she had witnessed coming down was now augmented and at its height.  Such a crush of finery and folly she had never seen.  It clinched her convictions concerning her state.  She had not lived, could not lay claim to having lived, until something of this had come into her own life.  Women were spending money like water; she could see that in every elegant shop she passed.  Flowers, candy, jewelry, seemed the principal things in which the elegant dames were interested.  And she—­ she had scarcely enough pin money to indulge in such outings as this a few times a month.