“Oh, yes, her voice, but lots of people have voices. Not many of us have quarts of diamonds, and I was wild to see those, and I hadn’t a cent except the quarter Uncle Joe gave me when I had my first tooth pulled. That always stands between me and starvation and I like to keep it there; besides, the tickets were two dollars. I could not go to Daddy after the affair of The Gold Buckles, and I felt a certain delicacy in approaching the cook on the subject. I was thinking of selling my new shoes when Laura’s note came saying six of us were to lunch with her Saturday. I thought that would make me forget myself during the worst time and keep me from pawning my gold handled umbrella.
“Saturday came and I rode down to Laura’s, trying to avoid the posters. It was an awfully nice luncheon and Geraldine wore her new green. Beautiful dress but it makes her look bunchy. Well, any way we had just gotten to mushroom timbales—don’t you love timbales? I wonder how they make them—. Well, we were at timbales when the ’phone rang and the maid said someone wanted me. It was Mary, our cook, and she said a messenger boy had just brought some theater tickets and should she send them to me or was I coming back before the matinee. My heart leaped within me, but I calmed myself by considering that they were probably tickets for Stereopticon Views of Palestine, for Aunt Myra is always sending me that kind of thing. So I managed to contain myself sufficiently to ask details. My dear, can you imagine the tumult and wild joy raised in my bosom when Mary read over the tickets and found they were for ‘The Golden Quest’ and there were six of them? I told her to send them to Laura’s and then I tore back to the dining room. You should have heard the shrieks of jubilation. We beat the table with our forks and sang the opening chorus. Six tickets and six girls and all in our happy clothes, the matinee only an hour off and they had all wanted to see it as much as I. When the first wild burst was over, it occurred to me to wonder where the tickets came from. At first they seemed a direct answer to prayer, but I began to think there must be a more palpable source. It wasn’t Daddy. He had not forgiven me enough yet to be so horribly generous. And the only other person was Aunt Myra and she is old fashioned and Presbyterian.”
“What has that to do with it, Cora?”
“Why, it means she regards me as a raging heathen and never shows me any consideration as her niece, but a great deal of attention as a soul to be saved. She sends me little books and a weekly paper, and when a missionary visits her house she invites me over. She hopes to show me the beauties of a Higher Life, but it only sets me against Presbyterianism, because all the missionaries make noises with their soup and it must be awful to belong to a church like that.”
“Cora, you are a disgrace to a civilized family. And besides, it may after all have been your aunt that sent the tickets, hoping to win you through kindness.”
“Mabel, you rave! Aunt Myra regards the theater as the clearest manifestation of the Evil One on earth, and her saintly little Caddie is not allowed to look at a poster. A nephew is visiting them now, and I dare say they are taking him to the midweek lectures on Genesis in the Light of Arabian Topography. I know Aunt hopes to win him to her church, as he has heaps of money and they need a new chapel. As he belongs to her side of the family I suppose he trots along, and perhaps leads the experience meeting. I should not wonder if he wears a lawn tie in the morning,—that is a special mark of sanctity, you know.”
“Cora, I refuse to listen to you. You don’t know a thing about real church life, so leave it alone and go back to your matinee.”
“With gleesome heart, my dear. After I had cut Aunt Myra off my list of possible donors I was absolutely at a loss, and we girls just decided to believe in fairy godmothers, when the boy came with the tickets. How we gloated over that little envelope. I pulled them out, and Mabel—they were box-seats—six seats, box-seats to “The Golden Quest.” Talk about your Valley of Diamonds! We were all dazed and felt as if we were enchanted. It is such a beautiful thing to have your dreams come true in that miraculous way, though to be sure I had no more dreamed of box-seats than I had dreamed of the Koh-i-nor in my new hat. We wondered more than ever, and took turns looking at the tickets for some revealing clue. They were good bona-fide tickets, but that was all. There was no card, no name, no hint; even the envelope was the theater one with just the address scribbled over the ads. on the outside.
“Well, we didn’t care and scrambled into our things and hied us to the theater, while the girls chanted my praises and sang pæans of rejoicing and gratitude. The theater was full when we arrived and everybody was in her most gorgeous things, and we were the haughtiest ever when the usher showed us to our box. Our box! Why, we acted as if we’d always had it for the season. There was a little delay, for some reason, that gave me time to think. The mystery of the tickets puzzled me and was beginning to worry me a little, too. What if there was some mistake and I had rushed into all this with my usual mistaken velocity! The responsibility made me feel a little queer, Mabel, honestly. If it had not been such a frightfully extravagant thing I wouldn’t have thought so much of it. But not many people send thirty dollar tickets around promiscuously among the deserving poor. The girls were as gay as larks, but I couldn’t let myself go some way. They could afford to be gay. They were simply guests, but I,—whose guest was I? It was sort of getting on my nerves when a little diversion came. Six dashing young men came into the theater and stood talking to the usher. They were quite different from the men about here and created a sensation. Any one could see they were strangers and we all wondered where they got their beautiful clothes. One seemed to be the head of the party and he was having quite a lengthy consultation with the usher, so we had a good look at them. We were staring with all our eyes, I dare say, when suddenly that first young man lifted his head from talking to the usher and looked straight into our box—looked not casually and accidentally but deliberately and prolongedly, Mabel, and I began to feel my hat was wrong when he turned back to the usher and shook his head decidedly. Then the usher looked at us and my heart jumped right up into my new stock. It was something about those awful tickets and perhaps there was something the matter and they would come and turn us out of the box. What would the girls do to me and what would the people think and who was that man and who was responsible for the tickets? I was beginning to wish I had never heard of “The Golden Quest” and was sure I couldn’t stand it till the third act, when the usher and the man turned around and went out to the box office. Something was going to happen. What could I do? Here were the five girls at the heights of bliss and anticipation, and here was I in the depths of anxious misery, and there were the five young men staring coolly around, waiting for their friend, and there was the man out at the box office probably demanding that I be seized and turned with my friends into the streets. But what could I do? It wasn’t my fault, for the tickets had been sent to me, surely. Perhaps they had been stolen and sent to me as a revenge from some inhuman enemy. I thought of everything, Mabel, and then the man came back, collected his friends and the whole party with their usher at their head, came down the side aisle toward our box. I had just time to arrange my sad story and be thankful I had on my best hat when they reached the curtains of our box. I started up, but, Mabel, they went right on to the next box and sat down. I breathed again, but not very freely, for surely that man knew something about our box, or was my guilty conscience causing me hallucinations? Yet why guilty? What had I done? Apparently the worst was over now, but I was not at ease and thought the incident might at any moment repeat itself with different results. There was a blare of orchestra and the curtain went up; after one hurried glance at the stage I glued my eye to the door again. Fifteen minutes passed and nothing happened and so I turned around—turned to look into the interested eyes of the man in the other box. Perhaps he was a detective and watching me, but he didn’t look a bit like that, though he had quite a different look from the one a man ordinarily gives a girl in a pretty hat. My hat was very pretty—you remember the big black one—but it didn’t justify, the inquiring interest with which he regarded me. Yet he did not stare. Really he did not, Mabel, but was very decent. I looked at the stage now but sort of felt him there some way, and had a little feeling about the door, too, so I wasn’t very comfortable. When the curtain went down on the first act I expected to have a swarm of irate claimants for the box swoop down upon me, but not a soul appeared, and surely no one would come after that. I took the little envelope out of my bag and looked at it again. Nothing but 1229 Second on it—in pencil—. That was our number all right. Then something struck me. It was just 1229 Second, and ours is 1229 West Second. But after all that could make little difference, as heaps of our things come out marked that way and there is rarely a mistake, as Aunt Myra’s, by some freak of fate, is 1229 East Second, and everybody knows us both and knows which is which. The only accident that ever happened was that awful thing about Mme. Durant and the bridesmaid’s hat—you remember that? That incident made me notice the address, but I could not explain the mystery that way, for no theater tickets like these could ever have been sent to Aunt Myra’s respectable door. These were the things I pondered and puzzled while the play went merrily on. I didn’t see or hear much of it and I don’t believe that man in the box saw much more. He seemed to be pondering something, too.
“At last the thing was over and the crowd trooped out—among them the five young men and the man. You would have called him the man, too, Mabel, for he was quite different from the rest. Such shoulders and such a carriage! He held his head as if he were commanding an army or a yacht. Yet when we passed them in the corridor outside the box he bowed with such respectful humility. He was awfully impressive, but I was too much troubled to consider him long.