“And what were you to sing in?”
Hugh laughed again.
“Really it sounds quite ridiculous,” he said, “but they suggested ‘Tristan,’ ‘Meistersingers,’ and ‘Lohengrin.’ Of course, I have studied those particular parts though I should have to work hard all autumn and winter. I imagine Reuss told them that. In fact, I imagine he worked the whole thing.”
Edith looked at him gravely, and across her brain there came so vividly the impression of how he would look in the blue and silver of Lohengrin, of how that silken voice would sound in that dead silence of Lohengrin’s entry, when he turns to the swan with the “Nun sei bedankt, mein lieber Schwan,” that it had almost the effect of actual hallucination. Again she had to remember that he was but a stranger to her, so intimate in that quarter of an hour when he sang had his voice made him.
“I don’t think it sounds ridiculous, Mr. Grainger,” she said. “Of course, it is your business and yours only whether you say ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’ But—but I think we should all come and hear you,” she added.
“Then if you were me——”
“Ah, if I were you I should, of course, do whatever you do. But not being you, I can’t understand you refusing.”
She got up.
“Good gracious!” she said. “Haven’t you any desire, any instinct to make yourself felt? I have it so strongly. I should so love to impress myself on the world, to know that there were hundreds of people listening to me, to make them laugh or cry, to make them beside themselves with happiness or mute from pure misery.”
She paused a moment.