"You have served me with another of your high authorities, Maestrino. The Chevalier says I have scarcely a voice at all; it is the way I sing he likes."
"I did not think it possible. And yet, now I come to consider, I don't think you look so much like a singer as another sort of musician."
She smiled a little, and looked into her lap, but did not reply. It struck me that she was too intuitively modest to talk about herself. But I could not help endeavoring to extort some comment, and I went on.
"I think you look too much like a composer to be a singer also."
"Perhaps," she whispered.
I took courage. "Don't you mean to be a composer, Fräulein Cerinthia?"
"Carlino, yes. The Chevalier says that to act well is to compose."
"But then," I proceeded hastily, "my sister—at least Mr. Davy—at least—you don't know who I mean, but it does not matter,—a gentleman who is very musical told me and my sister that the original purpose of the drama is defeated in England, and that instead of bringing the good out of the beautiful, it produces the artificial out of the false,—those were his very words; he was speaking of the music of operas, though, I do remember, and perhaps I made some mistake."
"In England it is very strange, is it not, that good people, really good people, think the opera a dreadful place to be seen in, and the theatres worse? My sister used to say it was so very unnatural, and it seems so."