"Oh! bother the overture. Let's stay here and talk until it's time for Sembrich. The rest of it is such a bore," Mrs. Rainbow protested, nursing covetously her ice.
Finally the company got under way and proceeded to the concert hall, much to Helen's relief. She had no complaint to make of her guests, who had been got together for Mrs. Stewart's pleasure. They were quite as intelligent women as she was, and all of them more important than she in the sphere where they lived. They were good wives, and two of them good mothers. Their talk, however, had seemed to her intolerably petty and egotistical, reflecting a barren life of suburban gossip and city sprees. Their husbands, working furiously here in the resounding city, maintained them in luxury for their relaxation and amusement, and provided they kept on the broad avenues of married life cared little how they spent their days. In Steele's great store, and in a thousand other stores and factories of the vast city, girls and women were mechanically pounding their machines hour after hour. The fine flower of all their dead labor in life was the luxury of these women, who ate and dressed, loved, married, and had children in idleness and ease....
The waiter came with the bill,—eighteen dollars and thirty cents, and two dollars to the waiter who stood eying the tray. Helen had been rather ashamed, too, of the simplicity of the food. She had not offered them wine, which she knew Mrs. Crawford was used to having at luncheon. Jackson would have laughed at her economy or been irritated by it. They often entertained friends in this same restaurant after the theatre, and she had seen the waiter carry off two twenty-dollar bills and return with very little change. It seemed to her plain nature simply wicked to pay so much money—the blood of human beings—merely to eat. They paid, she knew, for the tarnished ceilings, the heavy carpets, the service—all the infinite tawdry luxe of modern life.
"And why not?" Jackson demanded impatiently when she protested. "Don't I make it? If I want to spend it on champagne and crab-meat, why shouldn't I? I hustle hard enough to get it."
The argument was positive, but she felt that it was imperfect. Yet all their friends lived as they did, or even better: the bill for pleasure with them all was a large one....
By the time they had reached Mrs. Phillips's box, which they were to occupy, the concert was well advanced. The massive chords of the Tschaikowscy's symphony broke through the low chatter of the boxes.
"One of those bangy Russian things," Mrs. Rainbow whispered ruefully, as she tugged at her wrap in fat helplessness.
Helen helped her to disengage her lace and then arranged the chairs for her guests. While the women opened their opera-glasses and took a preliminary survey of the hall, she sank into the rear seat, pulled the chenille portière half over her face, and closed her eyes.
That "bangy Russian thing" whipped her blood and sent strange pictures flying through her head. For the moment it loosed the cords that seemed to bind her to a stake. The heat and smell and twaddling voices of the hotel dining-room faded away. And in its place the divine music filled her soul, transforming her from a weak and doubting woman, who floated helplessly in her petty world of comforts, into some more active, striving creature,—a maker and moulder of life!