"No," said Muriel flatly. She was looking acutely distressed, like a large sorrowing Madonna. "I think Mr. Johns must look a great deal sillier," she said with a kind of defiance. "Or that other--what is his name?--the one that pretends to be the Chorus, just one of him--he's _very_ silly!" "How is Bob doing?" Mazie asked. Bob was the Chorus. He was no actor; but the part only required someone with a voice, and he had a really beautiful high sweet tenor. All he must do was to appear in season and out of season and jodel, which he did to admiration, with a perfectly grave face, for as I have said, he was of a sober disposition, and to tell the truth saw nothing comic in it. But about the seventh or eighth jodel the audience fell into paroxysms of laughter and so continued whenever the Chorus came on. Bob made one of the hits of the evening, to his own great confusion and the frank surprise of everyone else in the cast. "Bob? Oh, all right. But that's one of the things they're laughing at; isn't that funny?" "Why not, if he's funny?" said Muriel, puzzled. "Oh, I don't mean funny _that_ way, you know, I mean _funny_. Why don't you come and look on a while, Maze? Bob'll do better if you're there." "Oh, I guess I don't care to," said Mazie with indolent emphasis. "I'd tear my dress or something. It's all full of ropes and nails and pegs behind there." She leaned back in her rocker, contemplating the sweeping breadths of her dull red silk train, spangled with jets; the front of her low corsage darted light from innumerable facets of jet and diamonds. In the absence of an actual tiara, her mother's diamond necklace had been fastened on a symmetrical frame of silver wire, and gleamed abroad from Mazie's dead-black hair, arranged in a forest of bangs. Without a single pretty feature, she wrought a curious illusion of dark and brilliant beauty; and Kitty gave her the tribute of an unwilling admiration. A girl, and not a handsome girl at that, who was too lazy or too stiff-necked to walk half-a-dozen steps to show herself when she was looking her best to a man, who as we all knew was in love with her, and who would be no poor match either--such a girl, I say, commanded all the respect of which Kitty's small soul was capable.