“How like Bentford Main Street!” I laughed, as we emerged from Fourty-fourth Street into the blaze of grotesque electric signs which have a kind of bizarre beauty, none the less. “Where shall we go?”
“There’s a revival of ’Patience’ at the Casino,” she suggested, “and there are the Ziegfeld Follies––”
“Not the Follies,” I answered. “I’m neither a drummer nor a rural Sunday-school superintendent. Gilbert and Sullivan sounds good, and I’ve never heard ’Patience.’”
We found our places in the Casino just as the curtain was going up, and I saw “Patience” for the first time. I was glad it was for the first time, because she was with me, to share my delight. As incomparable tune after tune floated out to us the absurdest of absurd words, her eyes twinkled into mine, and our shoulders leaned together, and finally, between the seats, I squeezed her fingers with unrestrainable delight.
“Nice Gilbert and Sullivan,” she whispered.
“It’s a masterpiece; it’s a masterpiece!” I whispered back. “It’s as perfect in its way as–as your sundial! Oh, I’m so glad you are with me!”
“Is it worth coming way to New York for?”
“Under the conditions, around the world for,” said I.
She coloured rosy, and looked back at the stage.
After the performance she would not let me get a cab. “You’ve not that many peas on the place,” she said. So we walked downtown to her lodgings, through the hot, dusty, half-deserted streets, into the older section of the city below Fourteenth Street. I said little, save to answer her volley of eager questions about the farm. At the steps of an ancient house near Washington Square she paused.