The door closed after him, and Viola stood alone in the hall, smiling to herself. She made as if to watch him through one of the narrow panes of glass which formed small windows on either side of the portal, then suddenly drew back and shook her head.
“That would be bad luck,” she said, “and I’m too happy to risk bad luck.”
It was a few days later than this that an opera company of some fame in southern France was encouraged by a successful Mexican season to run up to San Francisco. Californians are notoriously fond of music, and the small opera companies which wander through the West, not daring to measure their talents with the Eastern stars, generally can count on a profitable season by the Golden Gate. Bad scenery, absurd costumes, and indifferent acting do not damp the ardor of the Californian, who will go anywhere and undergo any small discomfort to hear passable singing.
Mrs. Gault, who went every year or two to New York and found her ideas there, as she did her hats and dresses, derided the local taste for hearing unknown prima donnas as Leonora and Gilda. But her husband and Letitia overruled her in at least this one particular, and when opera came up from Mexico or across from New Orleans, she always went with them, and tried to look as bored as her animated features and lively style would permit.
This particular season, a short one of three weeks given by an Italian company that had been touring Mexico during the winter, opened with a performance of “Rigoletto.” For the first night Mortimer Gault procured one of the lower boxes, leaving it to his wife to fill it with such company as she desired, provided a seat was left for him in the background, where he could hear and would not have to talk. The party, which consisted of Mr. and Mrs. Gault, Letitia, John, Tod McCormick, and his sister Pearl, was late in arriving, and it was not until the interval between the second and third acts that they found time to look about the house. Letitia and Pearl were in the front of the box, the latter on the inner side nearest the audience, with John Gault sitting behind her in the shadow of the curtain. While Letitia looked about the house through her lorgnon she could hear the animated chatter of Pearl, interspersed with comments from Maud Gault and Tod.
“Do you see that woman in the box opposite—the pale one with the piece of blue velvet twisted in her hair? She came up with the company, and her husband is a professional gambler in Mexico and makes heaps of money. You can ask Tod if you don’t believe me.”
Tod said it was all true, and that she was a “peach,” a form of encomium that, in his vast appreciation, he was fond of applying to every member of the other sex that came within range of his admiring eye.
“In the box above, where the two good-looking men are, that little red, squeezed-looking woman is Lady Jervis, who used to be Tiny Madison ever so long ago. She went abroad and married Sir Somebody or other Jervis, and she’s out here now with a syndicate.”
“What is she doing with a syndicate?” Mrs. Gault asked. “Is she going on the stage?”