“Unusual, anyhow. Arresting.”
“She doesn’t look like Cross Loman, I grant you that.”
“Mrs. Harter—Song,” said Mrs. Kendal, for—I should think—the fourteenth time. “I suppose that means she’s going to sing.”
It did.
Mrs. Harter’s singing was calculated to please the unsophisticated, rather than the critical, among her audience. As in most audiences, however, the number of the former predominated over the latter.
She had a good voice, a very strong and very true mezzo-soprano. She had, also, a number of cheap tricks whereby to produce cheap effects, and she made full use of them.
“Third-rate teaching of the worst kind,” whispered Claire. Behind me I heard Captain Patch say to Mrs. Fazackerly, “I like her voice,” and Mrs. Fazackerly, the most musical person in Cross Loman, replied, eagerly, “Oh, so do I!” for once enabled to combine responsiveness and truth in a fashion that all too often eludes her.
The Kendal family applauded with a detached, deprecating air at the end of the song. “I may not know a great deal about music, but I know what I like,” Mumma remarked, as she has very frequently remarked on other occasions, and Puppa hummed something to himself, which I think he honestly believed to be a true and faithful repetition of the last line of Mrs. Harter’s song, and waved his head about from side to side in a musical sort of way.
The applause in the room was prolonged.
The song had been a very popular one, a modern sentimental ballad with all the sham values of its kind, and set to a tune that frankly was a tune, and could be trusted to “run in the heads” of those who heard it for hours after the concert was over. Mrs. Harter received an enthusiastic encore.