For a few moments Mrs. Underbunk was silent and seemed to be listening to the music or the whispering in the next box. Roardika was making a great hit in the scene in Isolde's garden, and for a time even I was content to listen silently. I have never been a devotee of Wagner, but I must admit that there are spots in "Tristan" where the singing is music, and I can lean back and enjoy it, with eyes closed to shut out the absurd sight of the princess and her clandestine caller awakening with melody the forest in which her husband is hunting. Gladys Underbunk and I thoroughly agree. When Dumple began to make coins disappear in the air to an accompaniment of "michs" and "dichs" and "sichs," she turned to me and whispered, "Do you know, Mr. Mudison, I sometimes wonder why a man of your lovable nature has never married."
"My bachelor vows have been strangely shaken of late," I whispered back.
Thereupon she chastised my knee delicately with her fan.
"Seriously?" she said.
"Seriously," said I. "I have often thought of marriage, but, you know, I am one of those unfortunates who have been born to high place. In me you see the apotheosis of the Mudison ambition for centuries. My brothers all married for love, and have been forgotten. To me it was left to uphold the family name, and to do it I have an income sufficient to pay for my apartment in town and my visits to my friends at Newport; to allow me a few luxuries like a horse or two and a car. But I have to economize. Suppose I married? I see the decline of the Mudisons. I see my fortune divided, say into three, and my children compelled by our straitened circumstances to move in the dancing-class set, their children going to the upper West Side, and our name plastered beneath the speaking-tubes of the Ophelia and the Clarissa. We owe something to posterity, so I had vowed that I should be the last of the Mudisons."
By this time, King Mark, aroused by the singing, had reached the garden, and Sir Melot had mortally wounded Tristan between the right side and the arm. The curtain was down. The house was in ecstasies, and Roardika and Dumple were seesawing to and fro across the stage, showing their teeth in thanks.
"You notice that I said I had vowed," I whispered to Mrs. Underbunk.
"Ah," she cried, "fortunate Miss Twitter!" It is very clever the way women have of seeming to try to sidetrack you when they want you to keep on the main line.
But I am an old campaigner myself. The trout is never so beautiful as when he is running away from the hook. "You flatter me," said I. "Miss Twitter may be fortunate, but I know that at present I am the most forlorn of mortals. Don't you notice how interested she seems in Winthrop Jumpkin?"