_À propos_ our theatre-going together, I must not forget a story about her which goes back to that bloomer period. A little while ago, calling to take tea with her, I found her seated with a fine soldierly white-haired "old" man, and they were in such merry talk that I felt that perhaps I was interrupting old memories. But they generously took me into the circle of their reminiscence. They had been laughing as I came in--"Shall I tell him, General?" she said, "what we were laughing about?" Then she did. She and the General had been girl and boy together, and as they came to eighteen and nineteen had been semi-serious sweethearts. The embryo General--no doubt because of her pretty face--had taken all her student vagaries with lover-like seriousness, and had, on one occasion, assisted in a notable enterprise. The bloomers had not been definitely donned at that time, but they were on the way, glimmering ahead as a discussed ideal. Whether it was as a preliminary experiment, or only in consequence of a "dare," I am not quite sure. I think it was a little of both, and that the General had dared Irene to go with him to the opera (in the gallery) dressed in boy's clothes. She accepted the challenge, borrowing a suit of clothes from her brother for the purpose. Her figure, according to the General's account, had looked anything but masculine, and her hair, tucked up under her boy's hat as best she could, was a peculiar peril. How her heart had almost stopped beating as a policeman had turned upon the youthful pair a suspicious scrutiny, how they had taken to their heels at his glance, how she had crimsoned at the box-office, and hid her face behind a fat man as they had scurried past the ticket-attendant, and how during the whole performance a keen-faced woman had glanced at her with a knowing persistency that seemed to threaten her with imminent exposure and arrest, and how wonderful the whole thing had been--just to be in boy's clothes and go in them to the theatre with one's sweetheart. O youth! youth! youth!
As I looked at the General with his white hair, and Irene with her quaint little old lady's cap over her girlish face, and visualized for myself those two figures before me as they had appeared on the night of that escapade, I realized that the real romance of life is made by memory, and that for these two old friends to be able thus to recall together across all those years that laughing freak of their young blood was still more romantic than the original escapade. But as I went on looking at Irene, with the bloom of her immortal youth upon her, I grew jealous of the General's share in that historic night. Well, never mind, it is I who take her to the theatre nowadays--and, after all, I think I prefer her to go dressed just as she is.