Margaret nodded. She remembered now.
"I can never forget those three phrases," Eleanor said in a slow, thoughtful tone, as she gazed dreamily past Margaret at the wooden wall of the summer-house over behind her. "Never. How often during the last dreary six months have I not repeated them to myself. They had been alternately my joy and my misery according as my hopes of getting proper training some day, and my fear that I never would were in the ascendant. But all that is over now, and I am a pupil of Martelli's. Do you know, Margaret, I have to pinch myself sometimes to make sure that I am awake and not dreaming. Even as I sit here telling it all to you the whole situation—you, me, Madame Martelli, and everybody seem as though they were a part of a dream, a lovely dream, but still a dream. Does it seem like a dream to you?"
"N—no, not exactly," said Margaret, with a slow shake of her head. "It all seems quite real to me. But tell me what Madame Martelli said about your voice."
"Yes, I am not telling my story properly," said Eleanor, "but the truth is that though I sit here so calmly, and talk so quietly, I am just devoured by excitement whenever I think of my good luck. Well, I can tell you what Madame Martelli said in a very few words. She was even more enthusiastic than Signor Vanucci about my voice. Far, far more. I went down to her the very first morning after I got here, you know. Mrs. Murray was rather surprised at my eagerness to start off to my lessons, she wanted instead to take me for a drive and show me the country, she said; but I told her that I would much rather go down and see the Signora at once, and so, although I believe she was a little disappointed that I would not come driving with her, she took me down to the little house where the Signora lives and left me to my fate after she had introduced us. Picture to yourself, Margaret, a little woman with hair and eyes of almost coal-like blackness, and a little sallow, eager face, and you have the once great Madame Martelli to the life. Though she has lived in England for a great many years she does not talk English very well, and her foreign accent is very strong. She thought, of course, that singing and music were only to be my secondary subjects, and that I had come to her principally to study Italian, and at first I did not undeceive her, but got out my grammar and exercise-books, and did dictations and translations as if I aspired to learn nothing more from her. For two hours we kept at it, and then she looked at her watch.
"Your grandfather wishes, too, that we do a little singing and playing," she said, and a distinct sigh of resignation came from her. "Which do you like best, the playing or the singing?"
"Singing," I answered. "I love singing, Madame Martelli, more than I love anything else in the whole wide world."
"Indeed," she said politely and kindly. "Zat is vary nice. Your grandfather, he say through Mrs. Murray to me that you have ze pretty little drawing-room voice, and would I kindly teach it. And so," again that sigh of resignation, "will you please sit down to ze piano, and sing me ze leetle song? Hey, is it not so that you have ye nice leetle voice?"
At that, Margaret, I really don't know what came over me, for supposing Signor Vanucci had been wrong, and I had no voice, she would have thought me mad, but truth to say, I simply did not feel I was risking anything when I turned, and looking at her across the big grand piano that fills up her little drawing-room, and said, "No, it is not true, I have not a nice little drawing-room voice."
"Of course she thought I was shy and modest, and was nervous at the thought of singing before her, and her face, when I went on in a calm, matter-of-fact voice, 'No, I have not a little drawing-room voice, but I have a voice which, with your training, is going to be one of the greatest and best voices that has been heard in Europe this century,' was a study."
Margaret gasped, "Oh, Eleanor, how could you! for supposing—supposing it had all been a mistake. What did she think of you?"