“Absurd!” said Mariposa indignantly. “I don’t see anything absurd about it. I think it very pretty. My mother called me after the flower, the first time she saw it. They couldn’t find a suitable name for me for a long time, and then when she saw the flower she decided at once to call me after it. It’s the most beautiful wild flower in California.”
“It’s fortunate you were not called Eschscholtzia,” said Essex, who thought the name extremely ridiculous, and who found a somewhat mean amusement in teasing the girl; “you might just as well have been called Eschscholtzia Poppy.”
The spirited reply which was on Mariposa’s lips was stopped by the rising of the curtain. The crowded, rustling house settled itself into silence, the orchestra’s subdued notes rolled out with the voices swelling above them into the listening auditorium.
The rest of the evening was an enchanted dream to her. She had never seen an opera, and for the first time realized what it might mean to possess a voice. She heard the house thunder its applause to Leonora, and thought of herself as singing thus, standing alone on that dim stage, looking out over the sea of faces, all listening, all staring, all spellbound, hanging on the notes that fell, sweet and rich, thrilling and passionate, from her lips. Could there ever be such a life for her? Did they tell the truth when they spoke so admiringly of her voice? Could she ever sing like this? A surge of exultant conviction rose in her, and sent its whisper of hope and ambition to her throbbing brain.
As the opera progressed she grew pale and motionless. The wild thought was gaining possession of her, that she, Mariposa Moreau, with her four pupils and her sixteen dollars a month, could sing as well as this woman of European renown, for whom Essex, the critical, the vastly experienced, had words of praise. Once or twice it seemed to her as if the notes were swelling in her own throat, were pressing to burst out and soar up, higher, fuller, richer than the woman’s on the stage. Oh, the rapture of being able to pour out one’s voice, to give wild, melodious expression to love or despair, while a thousand people hung this way on one’s lips!
As the curtain fell for the third time she turned to Essex, pale and large-eyed, and said breathlessly:
“I could sing as well as that woman if I had more lessons; I know I could! I know it!”
CHAPTER V
TRIAL FLIGHTS
“The music of the moon
Sleeps in the plain eggs of the nightingale.”