“Go back to where I belong,” she said, and then came out of her ecstasy and began to pace up and down, flinging sentences at me.
“Try it again and do it this time. He says I can, and I know I can. Oh, Evie, to get away from all this—those hateful pupils, those hideous lessons—those women! To go back to my work, be among my own people.” She brushed by Roger, her glance, imbued with its inward vision, passing over him as if he was invisible. “It’s like coming out of prison. It’s like coming to life again after you were dead.”
“I could just let myself go and be wonderful!”
She had expressed it exactly. She had been dead. The mild and wistful woman of the last two months was a wraith. This was Lizzie Harris born again, renewed and revitalized, now almost terrible in her naked and ruthless egotism.
“What will you do?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought yet. Vignorol wants me to study with him for nothing, pay it back when I make good. But that doesn’t matter now. I can’t think of anything but that I’m home, in my place, and that I can do it. They were all disappointed in me, said I’d never get there. I can. I will. Wait!—Watch me. You’ll see me on top yet, and it won’t be so far off, either. I’ll show you all it’s in me. I’ll wake up every clod in those boxes, I’ll make their dull fat faces shine, I’ll hear them clap and stamp and shout, ‘Brava, Bonaventura!’”
She cried out the two last words, staring before her with flashing eyes that looked from the heights of achievement upon an applauding multitude. In the moment of silence I had a queer clairvoyant feeling that it was true, that it would happen, and I saw her as the queen of song with her foot upon the public’s neck. Then the seeing passion left her face and her lip curled in superb disdain.
“And you wanted to make a singing teacher out of me!”
She swept us both with a contemptuous glance, as if we were the chief offenders in a conspiracy for her undoing. I was used to it, but Roger, the galled jade whose withers were yet unwrung, winced under her scorn.