For some moments he stood holding her hand and looking steadily at her. The girl gazed up at him with her trustful brown eyes alight, and a smile playing about her mouth. “My, but you are big!” she naïvely exclaimed.
While she chatted brightly Ames held her hand and laughed at her frank, often witty, remarks. But then a curious, eager look came into his face, and he became quiet and reflective. He seemed unable to take his eyes from her. And when the girl gently drew her hand from his he laughed again, nervously.
“I––I know something about Colombia,” he said, “and speak the language a bit. We’ll have to get together often, so’s I can brush up.”
Then, apparently noticing Mrs. Hawley-Crowles and her sister for the first time––“Oh, so glad to see you both! Camorso’s in fine voice to-night, eh?”
He wheeled about and stood again looking at Carmen, until she blushed under his close gaze and turned her head away. Then he went back to his box. But throughout the evening, whenever the girl looked in the direction of the Ames family, she met the steady, piercing gaze of the man’s keen gray eyes. And they seemed to her like sharp steel points, cutting into the portals of her soul.
Night after night during the long season Carmen sat in the box and studied the operas that were produced on the boards before her wondering gaze. Always Mrs. Hawley-Crowles was with her. And generally, too, the young heir of Altern was there, occupying the chair next to the girl––which was quite as the solicitous Mrs. Hawley-Crowles had planned.
“Aw––deucedly fine show to-night, Miss Carmen,” the youth ventured one evening, as he took his accustomed place close to her.
“The music is always beautiful,” the girl responded. “But the play, like most of Grand Opera, is drawn from the darkest side of human life. It is a sordid picture of licentiousness and cruelty. Only for its setting in wonderful music, Grand Opera is generally such a depiction of sex-passion, of lust and murder, that it would not be permitted on the stage. A few years 125 from now people will be horrified to remember that the preceding generation reveled in such blood scenes––just as we now speak with horror of the gladiatorial contests in ancient Rome.”
The young man regarded her uncertainly. “But––aw––Miss Carmen,” he hazarded, “we must be true to life, you know!” Having delivered himself of this oracular statement, the youth adjusted his monocle and settled back as if he had given finality to a weighty argument.
The girl looked at him pityingly. “You voice the cant of the modern writer, ‘true lo life.’ True to the horrible, human sense of life, that looks no higher than the lust of blood, and is satisfied with it, I admit. True to the unreal, temporal sense of existence, that is here to-day, and to-morrow has gone out in the agony of self-imposed suffering and death. True to that awful, false sense of life which we must put off if we would ever rise into the consciousness of real life, I grant you. But the production of these horrors on the stage, even in a framework of marvelous music, serves only to hold before us the awful models from which we must turn if we would hew out a better existence. Are you the better for seeing an exhibition of wanton murder on the stage, even though the participants wondrously sing their words of vengeance and passion?”