I was terrified for fear he should turn and look at me. I longed, as I had never longed for anything, to have him turn and look. I shrank back lest I should find that I must speak to him. I was wild with the wish to lean and speak his name. What if he had forgotten? Not until I caught the lift of his brow as he turned, the line of his chin, the touch of his hand, already familiar, to his forehead, did I know how well I had remembered. And then, abruptly, I was shot through with a sweetness and a pride: The time had come! I could meet him as I had dreamed of meeting him, speak to him as I had hoped sometime to speak to him, as some one a little within his world....
"The bally trouble with opera—" Gerald was beginning.
"Please, please!" I said. "You talked right through that act, Gerald. Let me sit still now!"
Mr. Ember, his face turned somewhat toward the house, was talking to the woman beside him.
" ... the new day," he said. "Such a place as this gives one hope. For all the folly of it, some do care. Here is music—a good deal segregated, in a place apart, for folk to come and participate. And they come—by jove, you know, they come!"
The woman said something which I did not hear.
"Not as pure an example as a symphony concert," he said, "no. There they demand nothing—no accessories, no deception, no laughter—even no story! That is music, pure and undefiled, and, it seems to me, really socialized. There participation is complete, with no interventions. I tell you we're coming on! Any day now, the drama may do the same thing!"
He listened to the woman again, and nodded, without looking at her. That made me think of a new wonder—of what it would be to have him understand one like that.
"Ah, yes," he said, "there's the heartbreak. God knows how long it will be before these things will be for more than the few. This whole thing,"—his arm went out toward the house—"and us with it, are sitting on the chests of the rest of them. And that isn't so bad, bad as it is. The worst is that we don't even know it."
"But what is one to do?" she cried—her voice was so eager that I caught some of what she said. "What can one do?"