"I regret, young man, that you should have had so much trouble. Here is some requital."
He took the money, selected from it one silver coin, and returned the rest.
"I will keep this, madam, if you please, as a memento that I once had the honour of being useful to Mrs. Siddons."
She looked at him keenly, out of her wonderful dark eyes, then curtsied with grave dignity—"I thank you, sir," she said, and passed on.
A few minutes after some underling of the theatre found us out and brought us, "by Mrs. Siddons' desire," to the best places the house could afford.
It was a glorious night. At this distance of time, when I look back upon it my old blood leaps and burns. I repeat, it was a glorious night!
Before the curtain rose we had time to glance about us on that scene, to both entirely new—the inside of a theatre. Shabby and small as the place was, it was filled with all the beau monde of Coltham, which then, patronized by royalty, rivalled even Bath in its fashion and folly. Such a dazzle of diamonds and spangled turbans and Prince-of-Wales' plumes. Such an odd mingling of costume, which was then in a transition state, the old ladies clinging tenaciously to the stately silken petticoats and long bodices, surmounted by the prim and decent bouffantes, while the younger belles had begun to flaunt in the French fashions of flimsy muslins, shortwaisted—narrow-skirted. These we had already heard Jael furiously inveighing against: for Jael, Quakeress as she was, could not quite smother her original propensity towards the decoration of "the flesh," and betrayed a suppressed but profound interest in the same.
John and I quite agreed with her, that it was painful to see gentle English girls clad, or rather un-clad, after the fashion of our enemies across the Channel; now, unhappy nation! sunk to zero in politics, religion, and morals—where high-bred ladies went about dressed as heathen goddesses, with bare arms and bare sandalled feet, gaining none of the pure simplicity of the ancient world, and losing all the decorous dignity of our modern times.
We two—who had all a boy's mysterious reverence for womanhood in its most ideal, most beautiful form, and who, I believe, were, in our ignorance, expecting to behold in every woman an Imogen, a Juliet, or a Desdemona—felt no particular attraction towards the ungracefully attired, flaunting, simpering belles of Coltham.
But—the play began.