Mrs. Galloway took him in to dinner, and it was not until the second act of the opera that he had a chance to talk with the Boston woman in the party--Mrs. Staunton. Then he slipped into the chair behind her; but she would not talk while the curtain was up. Grand opera bored him, so he passed the time in gazing round the grand-tier boxes--the Galloway box was to the left of the centre. The twilight was not dark enough to hide the part of the show that interested him. He knew New York fashionable society well now, and as he looked he noted each woman and recalled how many millions she represented. “Gad, how rich they are--these beggars,” he thought enviously. And he was seized by a mild attack of what an eminent New York lawyer describes as “the fury of the parasite”--that hate which succeeds contempt in the parasite as its intended victim eludes it.
When the curtain went down on the last of seven uproarious calls--the opera was “Carmen,” and Calvé was singing it--Mrs. Staunton’s disdainful expression gave him the courage to say: “Ghastly row they make, eh?”
Mrs. Staunton was perhaps fifty years old, long and thin, with a severe profile and a sweet and intelligent, if somewhat too complacent, front face. “Calvé sings rather well--in spots,” she said. “But I doubt if Boston would have given her seven calls.”
The mirthful shine of Frothingham’s right eye might have been a reflection from his glass; again, it might have been really in his eye where it seemed to be--Mrs. Staunton was so seated that she could not see him as he talked over her shoulder into her ear. “Really,” was all he said.
“You’ve not been at Boston?” asked Mrs. Staunton.
“Not yet. I thought it would be well to get acclimated, as it were, before I ventured away from New York.”
“You will have it to do over again,” said Mrs. Staunton. “We are very different. Here money is king and god, and----” Mrs. Staunton cast a supercilious glance round the brilliant and beautiful, and even dazzling, grand tier. “You see the result. Really, New York is becoming intolerably vulgar. I come here rarely, and leave as soon as I decently can. But one can’t stay here even for a few days without being corrupted. The very language is corrupt here, and among those who call themselves the best people.”