"Sing something—I'll play for you."
He swept her off the piano-stool.
"I don't know much but ballads."
She pulled the yellowed sheets out of the stand, wondering as she turned them over which, if any, of these songs he had heard sung by great artists. She was on the point of asking him, when, "Oh," she said, jumping up, "here's this from 'Trovatore,'" and she set the music before him with the firm intention of rivalling that Patti people made such a fuss about. She sang the English words, "Ah, I've sighed to rest me," and not without a certain largeness of effect intensely satisfying to herself.
"There's no doubt," he said, at the end, "that you have a voice. You, naturally, don't in the least know how to use it; but it's there."
This was not what she had expected—in fact, it was a blow; for, in spite of her old desire to be taught, she looked towards a singing-master chiefly as a personal influence to help her into the operatic field. She felt it a grievance against her family that she had had no early advantages, and yet she had thought it more than probable that genius could do without them. But what if cousin Ethan was right? All the more need not to lose time.
"The question is," she said, "What's to be done?"
"Done?"
"Yes."
It flashed over her in the pause that he might think she was hinting that he should defray the expense of her training, and this suddenly seemed as repulsive to reason and to dignity as if five months before she had not calmly suggested it herself. It was Heaven's own mercy that letter had got lost! She must have been crazy when she wrote it.