"Awfully. Why, he only asked me because he wanted you! Next time it will be you alone."
Jean needed little coaxing. She wanted exceedingly to see a New York theater, and she really liked the breezy young dentist. It had surprised her in their evening talks to find how much they had in common. He, too, had spent his youth in a country town, and, though he had migrated first to a smaller city to study for his profession, his early impressions of New York coincided very closely with her own. She later discovered the same community of interest with nearly every one so reared, but it now chanced that none other of Mrs. St. Aubyn's boarders—or, as she preferred to call them, guests—were country-bred, and Paul Bartlett got the credit of a readier sympathy accordingly. Thus, to-night, he did not share Amy's rather too frequently expressed wonder that Jean had never witnessed a vaudeville performance.
"Never saw anything nearer to it than a minstrel show myself, up to the time I went away to dental college," he confessed frankly, as they set out. "We only got 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' and 'East Lynne' troupes in our burg. Say, but they were a rocky aggregation! I could see that even then."
This also struck Jean as a notable coincidence.
"It seems as if you were describing the Springs," she said. "But we did get a circus or two."
"Then your town beat mine," Paul laughed. "We had to jog over to the county seat for Barnum's. Otherwise they seem to have been cut off the same piece of homespun. I'll bet you even had box socials?"
Jean's face suddenly lost its animation.
"Yes," she answered.
"Just about the limit, weren't they? I wonder Newport doesn't take 'em up. They're foolish enough. Yet I thought they were great sport once. I used to try to change the boxes when I suspected that some love-sick pair were scheming to beat the game. Maybe you've done that, too?"
"Yes," Jean assented again unsteadily.