cadences? Never mind Wagner's tap of his paedagogue's baton--a cadence
catches me still. Early taste for barley-sugar, perhaps! There's a
march in Verdi's Attila and I Lombardi, I declare I'm in military step
when I hear them, as in the old days, after leaving the Opera. Fredi
takes little Mab Mountney to her first Opera to-night. Enough to make us
old ones envious! You remember your first Opera, Fenellan? Sonnambula,
with me. I tell you, it would task the highest poetry--say, require, if
you like--showing all that's noblest, splendidest, in a young man, to
describe its effect on me. I was dreaming of my box at the Opera for a
year after. The Huguenots to-night. Not the best suited for little
Mabsy; but she'll catch at the Rataplan. Capital Opera; we used to think
it the best, before we had Tannhauser and Lohengrin and the
Meistersinger.'

Victor hinted notes of the Conspiration Scene closing the Third Act of
the Huguenots. That sombre Chorus brought Mrs. Burman before him. He
drummed the Rataplan, which sent her flying. The return of a lively
disposition for dinner and music completed his emancipation from the yoke
of the baleful creature sitting half her days in the chemist's shop; save
that a thought of drugs brought the smell, and the smell the picture; she
threatened to be an apparition at any moment pervading him through his
nostrils. He spoke to Fenellan of hunger for dinner, a need for it;
singular in one whose appetite ran to the stroke of the hour abreast with
Armandine's kitchen-clock. Fenellan proposed a glass of sherry and
bitters at his Club over the way. He had forgotten a shower of black-
balls (attributable to the conjurations of old Ate) on a certain past
day. Without word of refusal, Victor entered a wine-merchant's office,
where he was unknown, and stating his wish for bitters and dry sherry,
presently received the glass, drank, nodded to the administering clerk,
named the person whom he had obliged and refreshed, and passed out,