Persis answered quietly and at once:
"I caught it on the thorn of a rose. It's nothing."
Willie insisted on seeing the wound, and was frantic with excitement. He was genuinely distressed. He poured out sympathy for the pain, anxiety for the future of the wound, the necessity for sterilizing it. But it was Willie's doom to be always tactless or unwelcome, and his sympathy was an annoyance.
Forbes was compelled to silence by Persis' explanation of the accident. He must not say how sorry he was, though he had wounded her—he had wounded Persis till she bled!
CHAPTER XVIII
THERE was an atmosphere of mourning everywhere as the enormous audience issued from the exits. It had assisted at the obsequies of a tremendous love, and all the eyes were sad.
Forbes had seen it stated until he had come to believe it, that the Metropolitan Opera was supported by snobs who attended merely to show off their jewels, and that the true music-lovers were to be found in the gallery. It came upon him now that this is one of the many cheap missiles poor people of poor wit hurl at luckier folk, with no more discrimination than street Arabs show when they throw whatever they can find in the street at whoever passes by in better clothes.
Forbes was sure that most of these sad-eyed aristocrats, so lavish in their praise of the singers and the music and the conductor, had come with a musical purpose, and he wondered if some few, at least, of those in the gallery might not have climbed thither less for art's sake than to see in the flesh those people of whose goings and comings and dressings, weddings and partings, they read so greedily in the newspapers.
During the long wait for the carriage, a wealthy rabble stood in a draughty doorway waiting turns at the slowly disintegrating army of limousines and landaulets and touring-cars and taxicabs—even of obsolete broughams and coaches drawn by four-legged anachronisms.