"You seem to be very much amused at something," drawled Sallie, while she looked in her languid way toward her trio of admirers.
"We are," said the satirical Mr. Fyshkille, who prided himself on always keeping his countenance. His two friends, who thought him a devilish clever fellow, both produced another laugh, this time suppressed on the part of each.
Pauline felt keenly annoyed. She glanced at Kindelon, telling herself that he must surely see the pitiable ridicule of which he was being made the butt.
She had, however, quite miscalculated. The self-esteem of Kindelon as utterly failed to realize that he was an object of the slightest banter, whether overt or covert, as though he had been both near-sighted and deaf. He knew nothing of the idle autocracy with which accident had now brought him into contact. He was opposed to it on principle, but he had had no experience of its trivial methods of arrogance. He had come into the box to see Pauline, and he took it broadly for granted that he would be treated with politeness by her surrounders, and listened to (provided he assumed that office of general spokesman which he nearly always assumed wherever chance placed him) with admiring attention.
A few minutes later he had stripped his would-be foes of all sting by effectively and solidly manifesting unconsciousness that they had intended to be hostile. He talked of Wagner and his followers with a brilliant force that did not solicit heed and yet compelled it. He discoursed upon the patent absurdities of Italian opera with a nimble wit and an incisive severity. Then he justified his preference for Donizetti and Rossini with a readiness that made his past sarcasm on their modes quickly forgotten. And finally he delivered a eulogy upon the German motive and ideal in music which showed the fine liberality of a mind that recognizes the shortcomings in its own predilection, and foresees the inevitable popularity of a more advanced and complicated system.
He had silenced everybody before he finished, but with the silence of respect. He had forced even these petty triflers who dwelt on the mere skirts of all actual life, to recognize him as not simply the comer from a world which they did not care to know about, but from a world greater and higher than any which they were capable of knowing about. And finally, in the flush of this handsome little triumph, he made his exit, just as the curtain was again rising, after a few murmured words to Pauline regarding certain night-work on the New York "Asteroid," which must prevent him from seeing the remainder of the performance.
Nobody heeded the opera for at least five minutes after his departure. He had left his spell behind him. Pauline at first marked its cogency, and then observed this gradually dissolve. The flimsiness of their thinking and living returned to them again in all its paltry reality.
"Of course," murmured Mrs. Poughkeepsie to Pauline, "he is a person who writes books, of one sort or another."
"If they're novels," said Lord Glenartney, "I'd like awfully to know abaout 'em. I'm fond of readin' a good novel. It's so jolly if one's lyin' daown and carn't sleep, but feels a bit seedy, ye know."
"I fancy they must be rather long novels," said Sallie, with a drowsy scorn that suited her big, placid anatomy.