A few nights later I joined them in the middle of the performance at Koster and Bials. Nina looked away from the stage only long enough to say "Hello." She was vibrant with excitement. Norman and I sat back in the box much more interested in her than in the commonplaces of the stage. We were both rather ill at ease in so senseless and light-minded a place. "This experience," he said and I thought I caught a tone of apology in his voice, "is bringing me a closer understanding of the life of the poor. Of course they’d resent my saying that Nina helped me to understand them. The poor are the worst of all snobs. We ’reformers’ believe in the working-class a lot more than they do in themselves. It’s hard to get at them—we only meet the kind who know how to talk and most of them are mute. The chaps in my Studenten Verein long for education. They envy us who had it forced on us—and, of course, pose before us. You can’t really get to people who envy you. "But Nina never studied—barely reads—don’t want to. This sort of thing is her _summum bonum_. I haven’t found anything that makes her happier than for me to put on evening clothes and take her to a flashy up-town restaurant. And she can’t help talking. She has no self-consciousness—no pose. What she says is reality. It’s the wisdom of the tenements she babbles out—the venerable philosophy of the poor. I’m learning a lot from her." "You needn’t apologize to me," I said. "I wasn’t apologizing," he retorted. "Why should I?" "I said you needn’t." "But you meant that I ought to—not to you, but to somebody. To whom? To God? To Mrs. Grundy? No—why should I apologize?"—He threw his arm back so that his hand lay on my shoulder, it was the nearest our great love for each other ever came to the expression of a caress—"I know you don’t approve, Arnold. But after all whom am I harming? You and I have been leading a pretty glum sort of a life...." "You have," I interrupted. "I’m in no position to chuck any self-righteous stones." "Oh," he said. "That’s what you meant when you said I need not apologize to you." "I suppose so." "Well, to whom then? Tell me," he went on when I did not reply at once. "I’m really glad to have the opinion of a disinterested onlooker. It always helps. Tell me." "Good God," I replied to his challenge, "I’m no oracle—no omniscient voice of conscience. But it looks to me as though apologies were coming to Nina." "Nina?" he said in surprise. "Yes. Don’t you see what’s happening? She’s falling in love with you. The real thing. She never saw anybody like you before. You’re like the shining white hero of the Bowery melodrama, who rescues the distressed heroine at the last minute—and _marries her_. Of course you and I know that the young millionaires with tenor voices don’t marry the distressed damsels. But remember the kind of dope her mind is filled with. The wedding march always starts up, just before the curtain goes down."