One evening that summer he went with Rose-Ann to a burlesque theatre on South State street. He noted the people who went in—workingmen, toughs, sailors, young men wearing the latest Arrow collar, and husbands accompanied by their wives. In the street outside, the wind picked up a litter of dust and paper and flung it into people’s faces. Over the roofs of tall buildings a dim moon shone in a cloudy sky. The brightest thing in this street was the arc-lighted promise of the theatre-entrance: “Refined Burlesque!” In the front row, in an aisle seat, was a white-haired man who seemed to be nearly a hundred years old; he sat there with an air of having occupied that seat once every week since the theatre was built. Midway of the parquet floor sat a placid matron of fifty, beside her fat and complacent husband; their views on all subjects must have coincided exactly with those of Dr. Parkhurst—they were solid blocks in the fabric of our American civilization—and they had come here to find something which their life required, not to be had elsewhere. About them was a grey mass of padded masculine shoulders, with here and there, in twos and threes, girls, making spots of colour on the greyness. Above, the balcony buzzed—and the peanut-gallery filled suddenly like the breaking of a dam. An orchestra of seven filed in. And a hush, not of eagerness but of religious certainty, filled the theatre. In fifteen hundred souls there was the calm that comes of utter confidence in the absolution (or, as Aristotle would say, _katharsis_!) which they were about to receive.... No one had come there for novelty; they had come for the familiar and satisfying benediction of burlesque. The old rite had changed a little with the changing times—it pretended to be a “musical comedy”—but the heart of the ancient mystery was still there. The tunes were those invented by Jubal, father of all such as handle the harp and organ—revised slightly, year by year; the first chord awoke dim ancestral memories. There was a trace of plot on the program, and the name of an author; but no one was deceived. For, to put any doubts at rest, and to make clear that this was simply the ten millionth performance of the seasonal festival invented by Adam (after a hard day’s work pulling eucalyptus stumps to the westward of Eden), it was entitled, in the good old traditional manner, “The Jolly Girls.”