The halls were faintly reminiscent of meals that had gone before, and Jacqueline, holding her jonquils to her face, decided against dinner. She made her way up two flights to her room, and sat down upon the bed, shivering, battling with a sense of discouragement that was almost panic.
The streets had lost their fleeting semblance of Spring long before she reached this place she called home, and were like bleak cañons through which the wind whistled hungrily. Jacqueline remembered a time not long since when she had found the wind bracing, stimulating, a playmate daring her to a game of romps. But that was a country wind, coming clean over wide spaces of hill and meadow; not this thing which filled her eyes and lungs with gritty dust, and whirled old newspapers and orange-peel and filthy rags along the gutters.
It was not the first time she had found herself lately battling with a sense of acute discouragement. Her singing-master, a fat and onion-smelling artist recommended very wisely by Channing, had been at first enthusiastic about the possibilities of her voice; but recently she had found it difficult to please him.
"Der organ is there, ja wohl, der organ. But Herr Gott im Himmel, is it mit der organ alone dot zinging makes himself? Put somesing inside der organ, meine gnädiges fraülein, I beg of you!"
That was just what Jacqueline seemed no longer able to do. What energy, what spirit she had, went into the mere business of living, and there was none left for song. A voice is, more than any other physical attribute, the essence of vitality; and nature had other uses just then for Jacqueline's vitality.
She did not understand, however, and sat there shivering uncontrollably, facing the grim fact of failure. Worse than failure—fear.
From where she sat, she could see her reflection in the mirror, and she looked at herself with frowning distaste. Jacqueline's beauty was oddly under eclipse just then. "I'm getting ugly—and whoever heard of an ugly prima donna?" she groaned in her innocence.
Then, suddenly, she saw what had been in her landlady's mind when, happening to pass her in the hall that morning, the woman had remarked casually, "You said you was Miss Leigh, didn't you? or was it Mrs. Leigh?"
Jacqueline had answered as casually; but now she understood the question. With a sharp intake of breath, she realized that the time had come for her to seek another home in this great, homeless wilderness of houses, that heeded her unhappy presence "as the sea's self should heed a pebble cast."
She unlocked a drawer, and proceeded to investigate her finances rather anxiously. She had come away with nothing but the money that happened to be in her purse, and her little string of pearls, her one jewel, upon which a pawnbroker, realizing her utter ignorance of values, had made her an infinitesimal advance. The lessons she was taking were expensive, and she knew that she must save for a time of need not far in the future. It was tantalizing to know that the generous allowance from her mother was accumulating untouched in a Frankfort bank, because she did not dare to draw upon it for fear of being traced.