"But that's absurd. You've--why you don't know what settlement-work means!" "I know quite well what it means," said Marian. "I have friends engaged in it, as I told you, and I've been visiting them and seeing their life at close quarters." "And you really mean----" "I really mean that here we are at the Metropolitan, and that we can't talk on our way upstairs, and we won't talk while there is music to listen to." Slowly their car had taken its grudged place in a long procession of its fellows, one by one unloading the human freight before the brilliantly lighted doorway. The pavement and the steps were a tossing sea of silk hats, colored scarfs, and glittering headdresses. Into this they plunged, hurried to the crowded elevator, traversed a lighted corridor, passed through a short, dark passage and came out to the Lennox box in the great, glaring horseshoe of the opera-house. Dyker, baffled by the sudden stop that had been put to his protests, looked moodily upon the familiar picture. Below them, climbing to the rail behind which was massed the orchestra, was the pit, white bosoms and bare shoulders, too distant to present, to the unassisted eye, any hint of individuality. Above rose the teeming galleries, line above line of peering faces. And to right and left swept the great curve of the boxes splendid with lace and feathers and jewels. He saw no more than that during the entire performance and, as Marian, even in the _entr'actes_, would talk of nothing but the music to which he had refused to listen, he heard less. The opera was "Lucia," and as Wesley, with a taste worthy of a more discerning critic, considered that work nothing but a display of vocal gymnastics devised for a throat abnormally developed, he would probably have been, in any case, bored. His father, who had what his friends called "family," had married what everybody called "money," but had managed to invest that commodity with a talent for choosing failures, and, when both parents had died, Wesley, fresh from the Columbia Law School, had amazedly found himself in a position where he would actually have to turn his education to practical account. For five years he held a thankless, underpaid and unmentioned partnership in a well-known firm of corporation-lawyers. He drew their briefs, and developed a genuine talent for the task, but he was never given a chance to plead. The worm of necessity spun its cocoon in his brain, but the emerging butterfly of ambition could find no way to liberty.