He endured his martyrdom till his party arrived--the Gilsons, Claire,
Jeff Saxton, and a glittering young woman whose name, Milt thought, was
Mrs. Corey.
And Saxton wasn't wearing a high hat! He wore a soft one, and he didn't
seem to care!
Milt straightened up, followed them through the manifold dangers of the
lobby, down a perilous aisle of uptilted scornful faces, to a red narrow
corridor, winding stairs, a secret passage, a mysterious dark
closet--and he walked out into a room with one side missing, and, on
that side, ten trillion people in a well, and nine trillion of them
staring at him and noticing that he'd rented his dress-suit. Hot about
the neck, he stumbled over one or two chairs, and was permitted to rest
in a foolish little gilt chair in the farthest corner.
Once safe, he felt much better. Except that Jeff did put on white kid
gloves, Milt couldn't see that they two looked so different. And neither
of the two men in the next box wore gloves. Milt made sure of that
comfort; he reveled in it; he looked at Claire, and in her loyal smile
found ease.
He snarled, "She trusts you. Forget you're a dub. Try to be human. Hang
it, I'm no greener at the opera than old horsehair sofa there would be
at a garage."
There was something---- What was it he was trying to remember? Oh yes.
When he'd worked in the Schoenstrom flour-mill, as engineer, at
eighteen, the owner had tried to torment him (to "get his goat," Milt
put it), and Milt had found that the one thing that would save him was
to smile as though he knew more than he was telling. It did not, he
remembered, make any difference whether or not the smile was real. If he
merely looked the miller up and down, and smiled cynically, he was let
alone.
Why not---Saxton was bending toward him, asking in honeyed respectfulness: "Don't you think that the new school in music--audible pointillage, one
might call it--mistakes cacophony for power?"
Milt smiled, paternally.
Saxton waited for something more. He dug the nail of his right middle
finger into his thumb, looked thoughtful, and attacked again: "Which do you like better: the new Italian music, or the orthodox
German?"
Milt smiled like two uncles watching a clever baby, and patronized
Saxton with, "They both have their points."
He saw that Claire was angry; but that the Gilsons and Mrs. Corey,
flap-eared, gape-mouthed, forward-bending, were very proud of their
little Jeff. He saw that, except for their clothes and self-conscious
coiffures, they were exactly like a gang of cracker-box loafers at
Heinie Rauskukle's badgering a new boy in town.
Saxton looked bad-tempered. Then Mrs. Corey bustled with her face and
yearned at Milt, "Do tell me: what is the theme of the opera tonight.
I've rather forgotten."