Baron had one moment of grave doubt as he marshalled his party before getting into the vortex of human forms. He thought his mother could not have looked less satisfied with things in general if she had been the Peri of the legend, just turned back from paradise because she hadn’t brought the thing that was expected of her.
But Mrs. Baron was playing a game. Rather, she was fighting a battle, and she remarked calmly, in response to Baron’s anxious look. “It won’t be so bad after we get inside.”
“No doubt you’re right,” replied Baron; and then they all pressed forward.
They got by the gatemen just as a car of the scenic-railway variety was cut loose from its moorings on a high platform to which it had been dragged, and began its incredibly swift descent along a far-off vista of trees and lights. Women shrieked as if they were being enveloped in flames, and tried to hold their hats in place.
“Mercy!” was Mrs. Baron’s comment; whereupon Baron dropped back a step, and hid his mouth with his hand.
The inrush of persons behind kept them going somewhat smartly past the first group of “attractions”: an “old mill-wheel,” with an entirely uniform supply of water tumbling down upon its buckets; a shooting-gallery; a negro with terrified, grinning face protruding from a hole in a curtain as a target for a group of men who were throwing baseballs.
A merry-go-round started just as Baron’s party passed, and a popular melody was ground out with quite superfluous vehemence. Mrs. Baron paused—startled into making a halt, seemingly—just long enough to catch a glimpse of an elderly couple, a man and a woman, mounted upon two highly colored lions. They were undoubtedly country people, and the woman’s expression indicated that she was determined not to betray unfamiliarity with the high life of the city.
Mrs. Baron hadn’t even an ejaculation which seemed at all adequate to her needs in this case.
“I think the theatre’s over this way,” said Baron, steering a course which promised escape from the main currents of the crowd.
Yes, there was the theatre, standing on a knoll with trees growing on its sides. A curved, flower-bordered road led up to its entrance.