“And is she really so great?”
“She is quite the greatest singer and actress in the world.”
“Ah!” Miss Cutting looked him full in the eyes. Her own seemed to say: “How wonderful you are to love and understand such great things, when most men at your age prefer the Halls!” Mrs. Cutting interposed in her cool, smooth, almost aggressively cultivated voice:
“But she, too, has limitations. She could not sing any of the old rôles. I may be old-fashioned, darling, but I assuredly do prefer Lucia, Leonora, Violetta, with their marvellous vocalization, to those declaiming and unmelodious rôles. I sat through Die Walküre once, and it seemed to me that they merely talked interminably in the singing register. It was quite a week before I felt rested.”
“But Die Walküre is full of drama!” Miss Cutting looked at her parent with a soft steadiness of reproach. Ordham had never seen eyes that revealed and concealed so much. Her small curved mouth, pink and half parted over the little white teeth, was as innocent as a baby’s, yet withal had a delightfully sarcastic uplift at the corners. “Dear mother! There is not a moment when one must not be thrilled by the happenings of very strange things indeed, and it was Wagner’s object to ennoble speech; he thought the old trills and roulades—and all—debased it.”
“Yes, darling, but the speeches need not be so long. Think of Fricka scolding Wotan throughout half of an interminable act; and as for that duologue in the last act between Wotan and Brünhilde—well, its mere memory threatens to deprive me of all the patience I possess. But I foresee my fate. I shall have to take you to Munich next winter.”
“A month at least. I must have that before we go to the Riviera. Oh, there is so much in the world to see, to learn! I wish I were thirty, so that I could feel that I had accomplished a little.”
“You have begun,” said Ordham, smiling. His anger and pique had vanished. “But I hope you like England.”
“It is my second home, of course. Mother has brought me here during most of my vacations.” But there was no enthusiasm in her tones, and she added: “I don’t fancy I shall care deeply for any one place until I have seen a great deal of life. My head feels like an empty house full of tiny rooms, all vacant behind staring windows. Well, one grows older every day.”
Ordham looked at that lovely head, with its mass of shining yellow hair, the full luminous brow, the deep dark eyes, the pure polished whiteness of the skin. He could imagine no more delightful task than furnishing those clean empty little rooms. He suddenly felt that he had accumulated a vast amount in his twenty-four years, and that perhaps it was his duty to decorate the interior of that shapely skull. But her eyes wandered from him again as Mrs. Cutting asked him abruptly what he knew of Styr.