Ordham had no intention of ignoring the impromptu to which he had been treated, whether she expected it of him or not, and on the following Thursday evening, as they were drinking coffee in the garden after supper, he said abruptly:

“I should not have recognized your voice the other night if I had not seen you—ah—when you demolished that poor little man. Is—is it the native American?”

“One variety.” Her present tones were dry, but without displeasure. “It was the voice of the Middle West. When I was Peggy Hill, working in the coal-mines—and for several years after—the burrs on my voice were as thick as a chestnut tree’s. Insensibly, in New York, they began to peel off, and soon after I went on the stage I fell in love with purity of diction and studied with an English teacher of elocution until I retained not a trace of even the generic American. But when I lose my temper it bursts out of its little dungeon exactly as other bad characteristics do when we are off guard. I used to flatter myself that I had uprooted certain qualities I resented having been born with, but I have discovered that they occupy remote chambers of my brain, biding their time. Perhaps I was one of the viragoes of the French Revolution!”

“Did you—once let it go rather often? Somehow you seemed so wonderfully natural.”

“I let it go pretty often down in that opera house. Men have such tact! Fancy telling a singer at the end of a performance, when every nerve in her body is a red-hot humming wire, that her wig was not on straight! The intendant came to me one night after the first act of Isolde and presumed to criticise my tempo. I threw a hand mirror at him, and he has never visited my dressing-room since. I would have treated the King in the same fashion, but he is the one man that would never make such a mistake. Wagner has a good deal to answer for! The lyrics are excitable enough, but the music of The Master creates a madness; it sets up a vibration in the nervous system, which, added to the obsession of the characters, lifts us bodily from the plane of the normal, and no doubt works permanent changes. I am talking, of course, of singers that have temperament as well as voice.” She lit a cigarette and leaned back in her rustic chair. “Before?—Oh, yes. But less and less as time went on. Tantrums do not hurt a prima donna; in fact they are of use in inspiring the authorities with awe. But in the private life—well, the price I sometimes had to pay was too high. I soon stopped throwing things about like a fishwife; and all the rest of it.”

Ordham studied her face attentively in the pause that followed. Apparently she had forgotten him, and was staring into the deep arbours beyond the river. Her profile looked hard and cruel, sharpened against the black shadow of the trees, like the fine edge of an axe. He held his breath as the expression deepened into sullen ferocity, then stood up, overturning his chair.

“I should like to know every bit of your history,” he said, “every detail.”

“How you would hate me!”

“I think not. Some people might have hated you the other night when you looked like all the furies, but I was the more interested. The usual does not appeal to me particularly.”
............