"Your true-blue friend,
"Corrina Van Winkle."
This dinner had not yet come off. In the meantime Mordaunt and Grace went to the Hurlstones' box one night to hear "Siegfried." The box was a large one, on the grand tier, and besides the Hurlstone ladies and the Ballingers, there were Gunning and another of the jeunesse dorée of New York. Grace had heard that society was enthusiastic about Wagner's music, and that there was a great difficulty in obtaining a good opera-box, for which far larger sums were paid than are ever given in England. She innocently imagined that people went to listen to the music; she was undeceived. She had petitioned to go early, as she had never heard "Siegfried," and she and Mordaunt were in the box nearly an hour before the owners of it arrived. At first all was well. The upper boxes were crowded by Germans, who listened devoutly to every note; so did the unfashionable occupants of the stalls in their morning dress. But in the middle of the second act, the grand tier, which till then had been nearly empty, filled rapidly with smart ladies and their attendant cavaliers, and from that time onward a continuous fire of conversation was kept up, without even the semblance of any attention to the orchestra or the stage. That was the only part of the theatre to which opera-glasses seemed rarely to be directed. They raked every box, and the Hurlstones', by reason of its stranger guests, more persistently than any other. In vain Grace fixed her eyes alternately on the book of the words and on the stage. In vain there were angry expostulations from the stalls of "Stop that talking!" Miss Hurlstone actually turned round deliberately and sat with her back to the house, talking to the Marquis de Tréfeuille and a number of other young men who flocked in and out; and in doing this, she was only following the example of others. To listen to the lightest French or Italian opera under such conditions would have been impossible; but when the music was Wagner's—music which demands the strain of every nerve, the tension of every intellectual faculty, to grasp the meaning of that tumult of sound, to follow and seize the floating gossamers of melody from the brambles of apparent discord—it was nothing short of exasperating. It became sound and fury, signifying nothing. Grace recalled the darkness, the death-like silence, of the theatre at Bayreuth. If Wagner could have risen from the grave to see himself so treated! She gave it up at last in despair, as Mrs. Hurlstone leaned forward for the fourth time (Gunning had been pouring his thin stream of small talk over her shoulder) and said,
"There is the Princess Lamperti just come in with George Ray—that fat woman in black, with yellow pompons and pearls. You know her history, poor thing! She was Miss Morse, of Baltimore, and fell in love with the prince at Rome. He married her for her money, and he behaved very ill. They were married more than ten years. There was never a word said against her, but after a miserable life she has at last divorced him on the ground of his desertion at his solicitation, they say, in order that he may marry some Spanish woman to whom he has long been devoted, and who is also very rich. Dreadful, isn't it? Every one feels very much for the poor princess."
Here Gunning, who had heard part of Mrs. Hurlstone's narrative, said,
"You know the prince, I suppose, Mrs. Hurlstone? Look up at the third box on the second tier. You'll see him there behind a very dark lady—I suppose Madame Moretto."
"You don't mean that he has had the effrontery to come here, when he knew his wife was in New York?"
"Why not? They're divorced, and Lamperti has cheek enough for anything. I don't think they are staying in New York City, however."
Mrs. Hurlstone, whose glass had been riveted on the box during this speech, exclaimed,
"It is the prince, sure enough! Well, I never heard anything like it—flying in the face of public opinion like that! Of course, every one will cut him. And what a coarse-looking creature Madame Moretto is! What on earth brings them here?"