When consulted about the theatre, Inarime showed sufficient pleasure in the prospect to quiet the doubts of her anxious father.
“Come down to Antoinette, and get something pretty—very pretty,” Constantine ordered. “You are not a fool, I suppose, and can take some natural interest in your beauty.”
“I am glad that I am beautiful,” she said, gravely.
“Very well. Put on your hat, and we’ll drive at once to Antoinette,” her uncle laughed hilariously. “Oh, women!”
Conceive the efficiency of a Parisian dressmaker instructed to enhance beauty. Bedeck Inarime then according to fancy, so that the costume be both scientific and suitable.
Constantine was master upon the occasion, ordered the carriage, secured the box, and fussily did the honours to the bewildered islanders when they arrived in the little back street in which the old theatre was located. It was a most grotesque and shabby paper edifice, ugly, dirty, unstable. But it was worth the tenth-rate Italian companies who hired it, and usually left Athens, after the season, bankrupt. The men, untroubled by feminine charges, sat in the parterre, King George’s officers, of whom there are many, enjoyed the spectacle on half fees, chattering, laughing, and ostentatiously clanking their spurs and swords against the floor as they walked about between the acts. Here and there an aspiring civilian made believe to come fresh from Paris by appearing en frac, and impertinently focussed the constellation of beauty in the box lined with cheap and ragged paper, and in the last stage of dilapidation.
They were playing the waltz when the Selakas entered their box. In spite of excruciating fiddles, and tuneless and vulgar singers, it was possible to detect its intoxicating charm, and Inarime sat and listened with a pleased, abstracted expression, her elbow resting on the front of the box and her chin against her cream-gloved hand. Constantine took the seat beside her, in front, and audibly hummed the air while his quick glance roved over the house. He saw Oïdas, the Mayor, opposite in a box with his sister and his little motherless girl. They exchanged an uncordial nod, and the Mayor raised his opera-glass to inspect Inarime. He passed it to his sister, and they nodded and whispered together. The young bloods below were soon enough conscious that there was somebody in the boxes worth looking at. Many an eye was turned from the middle-aged Marguerite, whose flaxen wig inartistically exposed the black hair underneath and who wore a soiled white wrapper of uncertain length, with grass-green bows down the front.
With naïve earnestness Inarime followed the actors, listened to the melodies, and frequently turned to bespeak her father’s attention. She was acquainted with Goethe, and knew the story of Marguerite in its classic form. But this sweet and voluptuous music was quite unfamiliar to her. Of music, good or bad, she knew nothing, and had only occasionally heard a village piper piping for the Arcadians to dance. She could see that the dresses were dirty and tawdry, but the novelty of beholding a tender love-scene for the first time acted even by a stagy foolish Faust singing false, and by a cracked-voiced Marguerite in a slovenly wrapper, with wig awry, to the accompaniment of squeaking fiddles and hoarse ’cellos, brought tears of sympathy to her eyes. Her emotions were too keenly touched to allow of her remembering the necessity of wiping away her tears, and when the curtain went down, the tell-tale drops had fallen on her cheek.
“What a lovely young woman,” Agiropoulos exclaimed, as he stood with his back to the stage, and leisurely surveyed the occupants of the boxes.