“It’s too early for her to throw it up,” Betty went on. “She hasn’t given it a fair trial. She gets one setback and an illness and then says it’s over. I don’t believe it is and I want to give her another chance.”
“But”—to keep square with myself I had to bring up difficulties—“she declares she’ll never sing again.”
“Oh, rubbish! We all declare we’ll never do things again. Harry and I had a fight last autumn and I declared I’d never speak to him again, and I was speaking—and glad to do it—in two hours.”
“Your husband’s not your profession.”
“No, my dear,” said Betty with a smile, “but my marriage is, and being a successful wife is not so very different from being a successful prima donna. I tell you this is all nonsense about her refusing to go on. She’s cut out for the stage. The opera bores me to death. I’d never go if it wasn’t for my two strings of pearls and the prohibitive price of the box. But I really think, if she was in it, I could stand even Tristan and Isolde.”
I looked out of the window—wonderful how the gay animation of the street had come back. And it was Betty’s idea and Betty was generally right.
“I could suggest it to her,” I said.
“That’s exactly what I intend you to do, and as soon as possible. I hate things dangling on. Make it perfectly plain to her: I’ll undertake the whole matter, give her as long a time as she needs with any teacher she chooses. And don’t you see if she’s taken out of this place where she’s had the failure and been so discouraged, she’ll take a fresh hold? It’ll be a new start in new surroundings, and she’ll feel like a new person.”
The most sensitively self-questioning woman must have admitted the force of the argument. If Betty’s previous efforts to play the god in the machine had been ill-inspired, this time she redeemed herself.
“Very well,” I said cheerfully. “As Mrs. Stregazzi would say, I’ll ‘take it up with her’ this evening.”