He had
too much politeness and good sense and kindness to show in his manner
that he was hit. So he said to Harry,
"That's your disadvantage in being short." And he gave Alice no reason
to feel during the evening that she would not have been his first choice
for the excursion. But he was none the less chagrined, and not a little
angry at the turn the affair took.
The Hall was crowded with the fashion of the town. The concert was one
of those fragmentary drearinesses that people endure because they are
fashionable; tours de force on the piano, and fragments from operas,
which have no meaning without the setting, with weary pauses of waiting
between; there is the comic basso who is so amusing and on such familiar
terms with the audience, and always sings the Barber; the attitudinizing
tenor, with his languishing "Oh, Summer Night;" the soprano with her
"Batti Batti," who warbles and trills and runs and fetches her breath,
and ends with a noble scream that brings down a tempest of applause in
the midst of which she backs off the stage smiling and bowing. It was
this sort of concert, and Philip was thinking that it was the most stupid
one he ever sat through, when just as the soprano was in the midst of
that touching ballad, "Comin' thro' the Rye" (the soprano always sings
"Comin' thro' the Rye" on an encore)--the Black Swan used to make it
irresistible, Philip remembered, with her arch, "If a body kiss a body"
there was a cry of "Fire!"
The hall is long and narrow, and there is only one place of egress.
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