She had to repeat the question before her father comprehended.
“Go, by all means, my dear child,” he answered. “I am afraid you confine yourself too much on my account.”
Helen was soon ready. She went out with Martha Grey and her cousin, and a few minutes found them standing before a large building with a spacious entrance.
“This is the theatre,” said Martha, addressing herself to Helen.
Helen little thought of the consequences that were to follow this—her first entrance within the walls of a theatre.
CHAPTER VII.
A NEW TALENT.
Seated in the theatre, Helen looked about her in bewilderment. She had never been within the walls of a theatre. In the street the sun shone brightly. Here the sun was rigorously excluded, and gas took its place. It seemed to the unsophisticated child like a sudden leap from noon to night. She could hear the rumbling of vehicles in the streets, but it appeared to her, somehow, as if they were far away, and that she had come into a different world. She wondered what there was behind that broad green curtain in front, and why the lights should be arranged so oddly at the foot of it.
“Lor’, child, that’s the stage,” was the lucid explanation of Martha’s cousin, to whom she applied for information. “Haven’t you ever been to the theatre before?”
“No, never,” said Helen.
The cousin looked at her with some curiosity, as if there must be something out of the common way about a person who had never been to the theatre, and expressed her decided conviction that Helen’s education had been shockingly neglected.