"Maybe you'd rather go in to-night," he advanced. "It is with you to decide. Is it preaching or show?"
"But you don't like preaching," she said.
"I don't count in this shuffle," he jested. "They are both shows to me. The only difference is that the burnt-cork and dancing people admit they want your money, and these people lie about it."
Tilly frowned. "You get worse and worse," she said. "Let's go to the show. It will be good for you after working so hard to-day."
"Well, we'll come here to-morrow night," he said. "We've got to have some amusements. You are by yourself too much. I've been thinking a lot about the way you are fixed down here in this measly, hypocritical town. You see, up there where you were raised you know every man, woman, and child, but here you are a stranger. I mean— I mean—" He was beyond his depth and realized it, quite to his chagrin. Tilly came to his rescue.
"Never mind about me," she broke in, quickly and with tact, as she drew him on in the direction of the lights and music farther up the street. "I am thoroughly happy here. I don't want anything but you and our little home. I love you more and more. Some day you will know why, but I do. I'm going to make you happy, John, happier than you've ever been."
He sighed, and it was as if he were conscious that the sigh which had surged up within him, in a way, was a denial of the hope her words extended.
He paid their fare at the opening in the tent and went in and sat on one of the crude, unbacked benches. The place was filling fast. Laughing parties of young men and young ladies entered. John told Tilly who some of them were. The "chipper, fluffy-headed blonde" was a banker's daughter, with the son of the president of the largest iron-works in Ridgeville. Another girl was the only child of a rich money-lender and the young dude with her was an ex-Governor's son, a silly fool that everybody said would have been in jail long ago for some of his scrapes but for his father's influence. John didn't really know who all of them were, though they lived in the town. They had grown up so fast and he had been so busy that he hadn't kept track of them. He did know, however, that they all belonged to a select dancing-club up the street, and they would go there after the show, no doubt. They felt that they were better than the working-class, and John said he despised them for it. Their people belonged to the leading churches and that accounted for their lack of sympathy for the poor.
There were some improvised boxes or tiers of seats inclosed in scarlet ribbons on the right, which were marked, "Reserved Seats, 25 cents extra." The young society people had not taken them, for some reason or other, but, on the contrary, had found places in the body of the little amphitheater where they sat merrily eating roasted peanuts which were bought from a loud-shouting vender with a basket on his arm.
It was all new to the young country wife, and she would have enjoyed it but for the grim tragedy unfolding in her experience. The music stopped, and the curtains were drawn. Two amusing Irishmen held the stage for fifteen minutes in a heated colloquy interspersed with songs and "horse play." Then when they had withdrawn, and Tilly and John were looking over the audience, a man and a woman entered, came down the wide saw-dust aisle, and turned into the reserved section. The man was very fat, short, and flashily dressed; the woman was also showily attired, powdered, painted, penciled, and perfumed.