Yet I stood there, undecided, watching the last of the scattering crowd, watching the street that still seemed an elongated bull-ring where a matador or two still dodged the taurine charges of vehicles. I watched the electric display-signs that ran like liquid ivy about the shop fronts, and then climbed and fluttered above the roofs, misty and softened by rain. I watched the ironic heavens pour their unabating floods down on that congested and overripe core of a city that no water could wash clean. Then the desolation of the empty streets seemed to grow unbearable. The spray that blew in across my dampened knees made me think of shelter. I saw the lights of the theater no more than twenty paces away. It was already a warren of crowded life. The thought of even what diluted companionship it might offer me continued to carry an appeal that became more and more clamorous. A moment later I stood before its box-office window, no wider than a medieval leper-squint, from which cramped and hungry souls buy access to their modern temples of wonder. "Standing room only," announced the autocrat of the wicket. And I meekly purchased my admission-ticket, remembering that the head usher of that particular theater had in the past done me more than one slight service. Yet the face of this haughtily obsequious head usher, as his hand met mine in that free-masonry which is perpetuated by certain silk-threaded scraps of oblong paper, was troubled. "I haven't a thing left," he whispered. I peered disconsolately about that sea of heads seeking life through the clumsy lattice of polite melodrama. "Unless," added the usher at my elbow, "you'll take a seat in that second lower box?" Even through the baize doors behind me I could hear the beat and patter of the rain. It was a case of any port in a storm. "That will do nicely," I told him and a moment later he was leading me down a side aisle into the curtained recess of the box entrance. Yet it was not ordained that I should occupy that box in lonely and unrivaled splendor. One of its chairs, set close to the brass rail and plush-covered parapet that barred it off from the more protuberant stage box, was already occupied by a man in full evening dress. He, like myself, perhaps, had never before shared a box with other than his own acquaintances. At any rate, before favoring me with the somewhat limited breadth of his back, he turned on me one sidelong and unmistakably resentful stare. Yet I looked at this neighbor of mine, as I seated myself, with more interest than I looked at the play-actors across the foot-lights, for I rather preferred life in the raw to life in the sirups of stage emotionalism.