At last we left the pleasant table, nodding good-afternoon to the Cap and Ribbons who had been cut from a coloured print to serve us. We lingered among the brasses and the casts, feeling very humble before the proprietor who looked like a duchess cut from another coloured print. I envied her that library of jelly.
On the street Miss Willie bought us each a rose for company and then bade the coachman drive slowly so that we entered the theater with the orchestra, which is the only proper moment. If one is earlier one feels as if one looked ridiculously expectant; if one is later one misses the pleasure of being expectant at all. We were in a lower stage box and all the other boxes were filled with bouquets of young people, with a dry stalk or two magnificently bonneted set stiffly among them. I hope that we did not seem too absurd, Miss Willie and I with our bobbing white curls all alone in that plump crimson box.
“The End of the World” proved to be a fresh, happy play, fragrant of lavender and sweet air. The play was about a man and a woman who loved each other very much with no analyses or confessions to disturb any one. The blinds were open and the sun streamed in through four acts of pleasant humour and quick action among well-bred people who manifestly had been brought up to marry and give in marriage without trying to compete with a state where neither is done. In the fourth act the moon shone on a little châlet in the leaves and one saw that there are love and sacrifice and good will enough to carry on the world in spite of its other connections. It was a play which made me thankful that Pelleas and I have clung to each other through society and poverty and dyspepsia and never have allied ourselves with the other side. And if any one thinks that there is a middle ground I, who am seventy, know far better.
Now in the third act it chanced that the mother of the play, so to speak, at the height of her ambition that her daughter marry a fortune as she herself had done, opened an old desk and came upon a photograph of the love of her own youth, whom she had not married. That was a sufficiently hackneyed situation, and the question that smote the mother must be one that is beating in very many hearts that give no sign; for she had truly loved this boy and he had died constant to her. And the woman prayed that when she died she might “go back and be with him.” Personally, being a very hard and unforgiving old woman, I had little patience with her; and besides I think better of heaven than to believe in any such necessity. Still this may be because Pelleas and I are certain that we will belong to each other when we die. Perhaps if I had not married him—but then I did.
Hardly had the curtain fallen when to my amazement Miss Willie Lillieblade leaned forward with this:—
“Etarre, do you believe that those who truly love each other here are going to know each other when they die?”
“Certainly!” I cried, fearing the very box would crumble at the heresy of that doubt.
“No matter how long after ...” she said wistfully.
“Not a bit of difference,” I returned positively.
“You and Pelleas can be surer than most,” Miss Willie said reflectively, “but suppose one of you had died fifty years ago. Would you be so sure?”