'But why? Why have you done it?' asked Margaret, still bewildered by the news.
Madame Bonanni had done one cheek and half the other. She leaned back in the comfortable chair before the glass and looked at herself again, not at all at the effect of her work, but at her eyes, as if she were searching for something.
'There is not room for you and me,' she said, presently.
'I don't understand,' Margaret answered. 'Not room? Where?'
'On the stage. I have been the great lyric soprano a long time. Next month you will be the great lyric soprano—there is not room——'
'Nonsense!' Margaret broke in. 'I shall never be what you are——'
'Not what I was, perhaps, because this is another age. Taste and teaching and the art itself—all have changed. But you are young, fresh, untouched, unheard—all, you have it all, as I had once. You are not the artist I am, but you will be one day, and meanwhile you have all I have no more. If I had stayed on the stage, we should have been rivals next season. They would have said: "Cordova has a better voice, but Bonanni is still the greater artist." Do you see?'
'Yes. And why should you not be pleased at that?' asked Margaret. 'Or why should not I be quite satisfied, and more than satisfied?'
'I wasn't thinking of us,' said Madame Bonanni, looking up to Margaret's face with an expression that was almost beautiful, in spite of the daubs of paint and the disarranged hair. 'I was thinking of him.'
Margaret began to guess, and her lip quivered a moment, for she was touched.