“It is such a heavenly day,” she sighed. “Somehow, I never can grow accustomed to spending summer in the city. How—how—does Countess Tann like London?”
“She loves it, of course. Who does not love London at this season?”
“Well, it is certainly much nicer than to sing here in winter. I suppose she is perfectly wild over her success.”
“She has never had anything else.”
“But I mean in London, where no one, that is only a few, really likes Wagner. Some one said yesterday that, although Styr’s personal success was beyond dispute, he feared the Wagner season would be a failure as a whole; five weeks of Wagner was more than any one not a German could stand, and if they give the Ring again—”
“They will do nothing so tactless. But Die Walküre is romantic enough to please the silliest and great enough to entrance those that really do know music. No other performance of Götterdämmerung will be given, more’s the pity, for Brünhilde was always one of her two greatest rôles, and her rendering of it has deepened and even changed somewhat since I heard it in Munich. But no doubt it would fill the house only once—with people that want to be able to say they have heard the Ring! Styr has also consented to sing Elizabeth and Elsa; her voice is rather heavy for those rôles, but a hundred people will go to hear Lohengrin and Tannhäuser where one will even show himself at the greater operas a second time. The enterprise is not in the hands of fools—I know several members of the committee—and everything has been thought of to insure the season’s success.”
“How nice! Of course she is quite extraordinary. I am so sorry I could only sit through one act last night. And what a pity I cannot meet her. It is too old-fashioned of mother.”
“You could leave a card on her.”
“But, Jackie dear, she would then feel at liberty to come here, and after all it is mother’s house.”
Ordham turned to her with a rising flush. “Do you mean that you believe Countess Tann would force herself upon any one? I must have given you a strange opinion of her.”