I have since found out that there is nothing the Germans like so much as an opera.  They like it, not in a mild and moderate way, but with their whole hearts.  This is a legitimate result of habit and education.  Our nation will like the opera, too, by and by, no doubt.  One in fifty of those who attend our operas likes it already, perhaps, but I think a good many of the other forty-nine go in order to learn to like it, and the rest in order to be able to talk knowingly about it.  The latter usually hum the airs while they are being sung, so that their neighbors may perceive that they have been to operas before.  The funerals of these do not occur often enough.

A gentle, old-maidish person and a sweet young girl of seventeen sat right in front of us that night at the Mannheim opera.  These people talked, between the acts, and I understood them, though I understood nothing that was uttered on the distant stage.  At first they were guarded in their talk, but after they had heard my agent and me conversing in English they dropped their reserve and I picked up many of their little confidences; no, I mean many of her little confidences—­meaning the elder party—­for the young girl only listened, and gave assenting nods, but never said a word.  How pretty she was, and how sweet she was!  I wished she would speak.  But evidently she was absorbed in her own thoughts, her own young-girl dreams, and found a dearer pleasure in silence.  But she was not dreaming sleepy dreams—­no, she was awake, alive, alert, she could not sit still a moment.  She was an enchanting study.  Her gown was of a soft white silky stuff that clung to her round young figure like a fish’s skin, and it was rippled over with the gracefulest little fringy films of lace; she had deep, tender eyes, with long, curved lashes; and she had peachy cheeks, and a dimpled chin, and such a dear little rosebud of a mouth; and she was so dovelike, so pure, and so gracious, so sweet and so bewitching.  For long hours I did mightily wish she would speak.  And at last she did; the red lips parted, and out leaps her thought—­and with such a guileless and pretty enthusiasm, too:  “Auntie, I just know I’ve got five hundred fleas on me!”

That was probably over the average.  Yes, it must have been very much over the average.  The average at that time in the Grand Duchy of Baden was forty-five to a young person (when alone), according to the official estimate of the home secretary for that year; the average for older people was shifty and indeterminable, for whenever a wholesome young girl came into the presence of her elders she immediately lowered their average and raised her own.  She became a sort of contribution-box.  This dear young thing in the theater had been sitting there unconsciously taking up a collection.  Many a skinny old being in our neighborhood was the happier and the restfuler for her coming.