Mariposa felt her hopes as to the training of her voice becoming mean and vulgar.
“He said he wanted to hear me,” she said stumblingly, “and she said it would be a good thing. And I have no money to educate my voice, and it’s all I have. Why do you seem to disapprove of it?”
“I?—disapprove? That would hardly do. Why even if I wanted to, I have not the right to, have I?”
Mariposa’s face flushed. She felt now, that she had presupposed an intimacy between them which he wanted politely to suggest did not exist. This was not by any means the first time Essex had baffled and embarrassed her. It amused him to do it, but to-day he was in a bad temper and did it from spleen.
“Somehow Jake Shackleton doesn’t suggest himself to me as a patron of the arts,” he said. “I don’t think he knows Yankee Doodle from God Save the Queen.”
Mariposa thought of the brilliant article on the Italian opera, from Bellini to Verdi, that the man beside her had contributed to last Sunday’s Trumpet, and Jake Shackleton’s enthusiastic admiration of her singing immediately seemed the worthless praise of sodden ignorance.
“Then,” she said desperately, “you wouldn’t attach any importance, if you were I, to his liking my singing? It was just the way some people like a street organ simply because it plays tunes.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t think that. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t know a good voice when he hears it.”
“Do you think I’ve got a good voice?” said Mariposa, stopping in the street and staring morosely at him.
“Of course I do, dear lady.”