There was a pause while Joy put the roses in the umbrella stand, and then the two stole out of the flat and down to the car line.
“Father has the address of a teacher I was to go to, you know,” said Joy.
Jerry threw up her hands, whereat a car stopped and they got on before she could speak. Then she exploded: “Getting the right kind of a singing teacher is more important than a safe doctor! An address that you don’t know anything about may be all right, but the chances are that the person isn’t as good as the one I’ve got lined out for you.”
“You have one all picked out, then?”
“Well, you can try him. Pa Graham is considered pretty good, but you’ll have to see for yourself. Any teacher may be all right for a voice that’s just a voice. But your voice isn’t going to be just a voice. It’s going to be pearls and tears and bliss and agony and all that stuff—if you start on the right road and no one hammers that quality out of you.”
Presently they descended from the car and walked through Beacon Street past innumerable tall, narrowly-wedged-in brown stone houses to one near Dartmouth Street. They were admitted to a tiny waiting room by a colored man-servant, and waited fifteen minutes before a haughty young lady, who, Jerry had whispered, was the occasional accompanist, informed them that Mr. Graham could see them now.
A high, wide room, with busts and pictures and beautiful rugs; two pianos; and Pa Graham standing at one end. The picture was one that Joy was to see so often that it would become a part of her. Just now the picture dissolved as Pa came forward with an old-fashioned bow. A little man, with high forehead and silvery hair well kept on his still gallant head; piercing light eyes which might once have been blue; a little old man who smiled when he bowed. Joy could not respond to the smile; she was going through her first attack of stage fright.
“So you have brought me someone, Jerry,” he was saying in a resonant voice that sounded oddly younger than he. “She is young and beautiful; that adds greatly; others may contradict me at leisure. But let us hear what she can do; after all, one cannot sing with golden hair and azure eyes, although sometimes it comes near to it.” He whirled upon her. “What did you bring?”
Scarlet, she opened her music roll and brought forth the two arias that she had attempted under Miss Bessie’s instruction: “Depuis le Jour,” from Louise, and “Plus Grand Dans Son Obscurité,” from the Queen of Sheba.
“Always they bring grand opera—no matter if they are sixteen or sixty. H’m—one is for a lyric, one for dramatic. Well, I take it you are a soprano, anyway; let us hope so, at least. Come and sing; best get it over with. I am discouraged already. With that face, one cannot expect much else.”