"Then poor is the word."
He sat and watched her in silence. She was thinking very fast. He could see the thoughts, as you see cloud shadows creeping across water--passing through her eyes. Even now, he knew that she would understand in the face of all upbringing, all hereditary ideas. But he waited for her to speak again. The moment was hers. He trusted her to make the best of it.
"Why didn't you ask me to come and see your rooms after we'd had lunch at Wrigglesworth's?" she said presently and, expecting simplicity, counting upon understanding, even he was surprised.
"Ask you there? To those rooms? Over the little greengrocer's shop? Up those uncarpeted wooden stairs?"
And then they found themselves under the portico of the Opera House; in another moment in the crush of people in the vestibule; then making their way round the cheaply-papered boxes along the ugly little passages to the stage-box on the third tier.
The attendant threw open the door. Like children, who have been allowed down to the drawing-room after dinner, they walked in. And it was all very wonderful, the sky of brilliant lights and the sea of human beings below them. It was real romance to be perched away up in a little box in the great wall--a little box which shut them in so safely and so far away from all those people to whom they were so near. Her heart was beating with the sense of anticipation and fear for the fruit which their hands had stolen. For the first ten minutes, she would scarcely have been surprised had the door of the box opened behind them and her mother appeared in a vision of wrath and justice. Some things seem too good to be true, too wonderful to last, too much to have hoped for. And Romance is just that quality of real life which happens to be full of them.
From the moment that the curtain rose upon the life of these four happy-go-lucky Bohemians, to the moment when it fell as Rudolfo and Mimi set off to the café, these two sat in their third-tier box like mice in a cage, never moving a finger, never stirring an eye. Only John's nostrils quivered and once or twice there passed a ripple down Jill's throat.
At last fell the curtain, one moment of stillness to follow and, shattering that stillness then into a thousand little pieces, the storm of the clapping of hands.
Music is a drug, a subtle potion of sound made liquid, which one drinks without knowing what strange effect it may or may not have upon the blood. To some it is harmless, ineffectual, passing as quietly through the veins as a draught of cool spring water; to others it is wine, nocuous and sweet, bringing visions to the senses and pulses to the heart, burning the lips of men to love and the eyes of women to submission. To others again, it is a narcotic, a draught bringing the sleep that is drugged with the wildest and most impossible of dreams. But some there are, who by this philtre are imbued with all the knowledge of the good, are stirred to the desire to reach forward just that hand's stretch which in such a moment but separates the divine in the human from the things which are infinite.
This was the power that music had upon John.