"Oh, father gave me my money ahead of time, for the lessons. He didn't approve, on principle, but he would have had no peace with me at home, and he likes peace better than anything. I had to promise I wouldn't go into musical comedy. That makes me laugh now! But I thought then I'd only to ask and to have. I took lessons of a man who'd been a celebrated tenor. He must have known that my voice was nothing, really, but he buoyed me up. I suppose they're all like that. It's business.
"When the money was two thirds spent I dared not go on, and I asked him to find me something to do. He'd often said he would when the right time came. Apparently it hadn't come. He made the excuse that I ought to have stayed with him longer. It would hurt his reputation to launch a pupil too soon. So I had to try to launch myself. And it didn't work. One manager of opera companies on whom I forced myself tested my voice and said it wasn't strong enough—only a twilight voice for a
drawing-room, he called it. I was broken up—just at first."
"Poor child!" Peter muttered, but the girl's quick ears caught the words over the roar of that "ill wind" which had brought them together.
"Child is my surname, and it's not polite to call me by it." She brought him to his bearings by suddenly "frivolling" again. "They call militant suffragettes and housemaids sent to prison for stealing their kind mistresses' jewels by their surnames. I'm not a militant; and I've not been a housemaid yet, though I may be, if New York isn't kinder to me than London."
"I hope it will be—kind in just the right way!"
"My friend who gave me the two letters of introduction says it will: that Americans love English girls, if they have the courage to come over. She says there are heaps more chances as well as heaps more room for us in that country than there are at home."
"That's true, but––"
"Please don't discourage me!"
"Not on your life! Only––"