One in fifty of those who attend our operas likes it already, perhaps, but I think a good many of the other forty-nine go in order to learn to like it, and the rest in order to be able to talk knowingly about it.

The latter usually hum the airs while they are being sung, so that their neighbors may perceive that they have been to operas before.

The funerals of these do not occur often enough.
A gentle, old-maidish person and a sweet young girl of seventeen sat right in front of us that night at the Mannheim opera.

These people talked, between the acts, and I understood them, though I understood nothing that was uttered on the distant stage.

At first they were guarded in their talk, but after they had heard my agent and me conversing in English they dropped their reserve and I picked up many of their little confidences; no, I mean many of HER little confidences--meaning the elder party--for the young girl only listened, and gave assenting nods, but never said a word.