She looked at it with the fascination that one always experiences for
what either brings near or withholds the unknown.

As for Joe, he was not bothered by the mystery or the glamour of things.
But he had suddenly raised himself in his own estimation. He had gazed
steadily at a girl across the aisle until she had smiled in response. Of
course, he went hot and cold by turns, and the sweat broke out on his
brow, but instantly he began to swell. He had made a decided advance in
knowledge, and he swelled with the consciousness that already he was
coming to be a man of the world. He looked with a new feeling at the
swaggering, sporty young negroes. His attitude towards them was not one
of humble self-depreciation any more. Since last night he had grown,
and felt that he might, that he would, be like them, and it put a sort
of chuckling glee into his heart.

One might find it in him to feel sorry for this small-souled, warped
being, for he was so evidently the jest of Fate, if it were not that he
was so blissfully, so conceitedly, unconscious of his own nastiness.
Down home he had shaved the wild young bucks of the town, and while
doing it drunk in eagerly their unguarded narrations of their gay
exploits. So he had started out with false ideals as to what was fine
and manly. He was afflicted by a sort of moral and mental astigmatism
that made him see everything wrong. As he sat there to-night, he gave to
all he saw a wrong value and upon it based his ignorant desires.

When the men of the orchestra filed in and began tuning their
instruments, it was the signal for an influx of loiterers from the door.
There were a large number of coloured people in the audience, and
because members of their own race were giving the performance, they
seemed to take a proprietary interest in it all. They discussed its