'Got your theatre ticket?' he panted. 'What for?' 'Give it me.' The Journalist fumbled in his waistcoat pocket, and threw him a crumpled fragment. 'What in thunder----' he began. And then, to Pinchas's relief, the car removed the querist. For the moment the poet was feeling only the indignity of the position, and the Heathen Journalist as trumpeter of his wrongs and avenger of the Muses had not occurred to him. He smoothed out the magic scrap, and was inside the suffocating, close-packed theatre before the disconcerted janitor could meet the new situation. Pinchas found the vacated journalistic chair in the stage-box; he was installed therein before the managerial minions arrived on ejection bent. 'This is _my_ house!' screamed Pinchas. 'I stay here! Let me be--swine, serpents, Behemoth!' 'Sh!' came in a shower from every quarter. 'Sit down there! Turn him out!' The curtain was going up; Pinchas was saved. But only for more gruesome torture. The third act began. Hamlet collogued with the Queen. The poet pricked up his ears. Whose language was this? Certainly not Shakespeare's or his superior's. Angels and ministers of grace defend him! this was only the illiterate jargon of the hack playwright, with its peppering of the phrases of Hester Street. 'You have too many dead flies on you,' Hamlet's mother told him. 'You'll get left.' But the nightmare thickened. Hamlet and his mother opened their mouths and sang. Their songs were light and gay, and held encore verses to reward the enthusiastic. The actors, like the audience, were leisurely; here midnight and the closure were not synonymous. When there were no more encore verses, Ignatz Levitsky would turn to the audience and bow in acknowledgment of the compliment. Pinchas's eyes were orbs straining at their sockets; froth gathered on his lips. Mrs. Goldwater bounded on, fantastically mad, her songs set to comic airs. The great house received her in the same comic spirit. Instead of rue and rosemary she carried a rustling green _Lulov_--the palm-branch of the Feast of Tabernacles--and shook it piously toward every corner of the compass. At each shake the audience rolled about in spasms of merriment. A moment later a white gliding figure, moving to the measure of the cake-walk, keyed up the laughter to hysteria. It was the Ghost appearing to frighten Ophelia. His sepulchral bass notes mingled with her terror-stricken soprano. This was the last straw. The Ghost--the Ghost that he had laid forever, the Ghost that made melodrama of this tragedy of the thinker--was risen again, and cake-walking! Unperceived in the general convulsion and cachinnation, Pinchas leaped to his feet, and, seeing scarlet, bounded through the iron door and made for the stage. But a hand was extended in the nick of time--the hand he had kissed--and Pinchas was drawn back by the collar. 'You don't take your call yet,' said the unruffled Kloot.