"Find your corner and dig like a devil," he said. "I suppose I should say go at it like a god. Only we don't seem to know how to do that—yet."
He sat silent for a minute, looking over the house.
"We don't even half know that the other fellow is here," he said. "The isolation in audiences is frightful. Look at us now—we don't even guess we're all on the same job." He laughed. "We need to unionize!"
Some one else came to their box and joined them. He rose, moved away, talked with them all. Then he came to his place again, very near me, and sat silent while the others talked. I could see his head against the velvet stage curtain, and his fine clear profile. But now it was as if I were looking at him down a measureless distance.
I looked down at my yellow dress and my yellow slippers, at my hands that were manicured under my long gloves. I thought of the things they had taught me, about moving and speaking and eating. I thought how proud I was that I had made myself different. And to-night, when I first saw him in that box, it was as if I had come running to him, like a little child with a few bangles—and I had thought I could meet him now, almost like an equal.
And I saw now that the girl who had sat there outside the Katytown inn and had eaten her peaches, and had tried to flirt with him, wasn't much farther away from him—not much farther away—than I was, there in the opera box in my yellow dress, with a year of school behind me. And my only chance to help in all this that he understood and lived was to go with Rose; and I had let that slip, so that I could come here and show off how well I looked, with my words—and my hair—done different.
The place where he lived every day of his life was a place that I had never gone in or guessed or dreamed could be. He was living for some other reason than I had ever found out about. And I had thought that I was almost ready to see him now!
As far as I could, I drew back toward the partition, out of his possible sight. But I heard the last act as I had never heard music before—because I heard it as he was hearing it, as we all over the house might have been listening to it. I listened with him. And all the anguish and striving in the world were in the music and the music's way of trying to make this clear. It said it so plain that I wondered all of us didn't stand up in our places and "go at it like gods."