“A year passed. I was bursting with life, with the desire to live. I was sick of being hidden away. My intellect forged steadily ahead in its persistent cravings, but other cravings kept pace. I wanted gayety, society, brilliancy. I wanted admiration. This man brought no other men to my apartment, took me nowhere. I fancied him in love with me and asked him to marry me. I shall never forget the expression of his face. I left him for a man who had followed me about for some time. He was what is loosely known as a man about town, with no affiliations, nothing to lose, only too delighted to spend money on a pretty woman and show her off. I drank the cup of pleasure daily. I met other women of the same sort, turned night into day, revelled in gorgeous raiment, choice food, fine wines, and a reasonable number of jewels. The man was coarse, but good-natured and generous.
“Long before this I had begun to read—literature. I now knew exactly what I was about, what I was. But the only effect of thought was to create a disgust for the particular form of vice in which I lived. Its vulgarity, its obviousness, became hateful to me. Meanwhile I had met, now and again, men of a far higher social caste, of education, polish. There was no question in my mind that my preference for men of this sort was pronounced, but to live with any one of them meant being hidden away again, and for this I had no taste. I dreaded the ennui, and I loved excitement, although I wanted it in the society of gentlemen. Suddenly I conceived the idea of going on the stage. This would give me a raison d’être, as well as a measure of independence. I did so, and soon transferred myself to a man of fashion and wealth, and a wife who was one of the handsomest, and, to judge by appearances, one of the sweetest women in New York society. I found him rather a brute, selfish, capricious, and extraordinarily mean. But I made a desperate effort to love this man, for by this time my mating instinct had developed and I wanted to love. I might as well have tried to love a brownstone front. I left him for another man of his class, and this man I did love. I tried to kill him. I once told you. For a time I forswore all men. I sold my jewels and went to Europe. But everywhere some man recognized me, and I found that I could make no friends save books, and I was too young for those to suffice. I returned to New York with a friend of the two last men that had protected me. I became quite reckless; and as by this time I was extraordinarily handsome, in a vital splendid way, and with something like genius in the matter of dress, I was more sought after among fast men than any woman of my class. I tormented many men to whom I yielded nothing. That was my revenge.
“Still I read and studied. I had not an illusion about myself. I did not pretend to excuse myself. I made money in stocks. I could have lived alone with my books. But I alternately hated and loved the excitement, the luxury, the senseless extravagance in which I indulged whenever I found a man weak enough to squander his all upon me. At that time I had but a glimmer of a belief in my histrionic talent, and even had I believed in it and been consumed with ambition, I should have met with but one reply from every manager—I was too tall. True, I might have got some man to put up the money for a starring tour and acted Lady Macbeth or some other classic rôle, but I knew that to succeed I must have practice first, and this I could not get. I was condemned to small parts in the background, and often would have lost my position altogether but for influence. Moreover, curiously enough, I avoided the notice of the public as much as possible. I kept out of the newspapers.
“I had no suspicion that anything could be made of my voice until I had lived this sort of life for some ten years. Meanwhile, as I told you, I had fits of horrible disgust, intolerable ennui. All societies save those peopled with the fast and frivolous were closed to me. Such unspeakably frivolous women! Many of them, too, were ladies born, but déclassée.
“I shut myself up once or twice again with my books, but I always went back. Life without men was no life at all. My brain seemed to be cut in half with a straight line of cleavage. One-half might contain something like a real intellect, inherited,—well, that is of no consequence,—the other was that of the courtesan pure and simple.
“Sometimes the intellectual side went to sleep altogether, especially when the men I happened to know were more interesting than commonly. Men, as a whole, are not very interesting. In the abstract, perhaps, but not to their wives or mistresses. But I was a woman of splendid lustiness, of insolent determination to cram youth to the lid with all that life offered to outcasts like myself. Circumstances had made me a waif. I would make the best of it. Several times good women came and tried to reclaim me. I argued them out of the house. What had they to offer in exchange? Would they receive me in their set, find me a husband, obliterate my reputation? One, I remember, had a sense of humour, and confessed that plain uncompanioned virtue would seem somewhat barren to herself after the luxury and beauty, the society of clever men, which at that moment I enjoyed: as a rule fast men have no taste for clever men, and they are themselves dull beyond all power of words to describe; but at this time I was protected by and half loved a Western millionnaire with a weakness for the arts and a desire to play the patron; which I encouraged. But he was shot—To return to the lady who would have reclaimed me; she added astutely that I had better take the cue from the wise prime donne and retire of my own accord. And she added, as she left the house, ‘There is always Europe, you know. And you have a brain.’
“But I had been to Europe; alone and companioned. It was soon after this that I ceased to blow hot and cold. By imperceptible degrees I came wholly to hate my life, to loathe it, to grow sick, sick, sick of men. Compositely they were brutes, the best of them. Life with such women, no doubt, brings out the worst in them. Perhaps their wives should thank us. Man in mental and spiritual undress are as disillusionizing as a certain President of the United States must have been to his household when hanging over the banisters of the White House in his red flannels and shouting for hot water.
“But I had lost the money I had made, for I had the stock-gambling fever. I thought of suicide more than once, for I not only knew of no way in which I could support myself decently, but I dreaded solitude, ennui. Suddenly I discovered my voice. That interested me for a time, although I had no idea it would ever be of any use to me. But my old teacher was enthusiastic and often inspired me with ambitious dreams, for he dangled Bayreuth before me, and at times I believed that he knew what he was talking about; at others it seemed too much like a fairy story, and I despaired.
“I made money again, this time a considerable sum, and I determined to gamble no more. I had a good friend in a banker whom I could trust, and he invested my money. I went West with that travelling company in order to break with my old connection. In time I should return and devote myself to music, even if I never went on the operatic stage. My musical tastes had been developed for several years, and at least I could live in some German or Italian city and study and enjoy music, no doubt find companionship in the society of artists.
“Then came the wreck. You know the rest. Whether you now know all, whether your imagination has carried you into all the dark corners, into every chamber of horrors—I can tell you the story in outline, but the details are beyond my strength—I do not know. I hope so. I can only reiterate that I have lived with more men than I pretend to remember, whose very names would be unfamiliar should I hear them; that for years I lived this life with my intelligence wide awake,—for I never drank, never took a drug in my life,—my literary tastes of the best, my refinement of mind growing daily; that when I finally abandoned this existence it was from no desire for reform, to be a good woman; it was without one atom of remorse. It was simply and only because I hated men, because that wreck gave me the unique opportunity to begin life over again, and my voice pointed the way. I have squeezed my character dry of the woman I was in those days—she is like an old book; I have hardly thought about her until lately. I do not even now, in this minute, think upon that time with regret. It is simply not in me to worry over what is past and done; nor could I appreciate the beauty of life as I do: no good woman has the profound appreciations that I have. But I recognize the justice of the retribution. The first departure from principles, or shall I say the social code, that I never had heard of, was inevitable. So were the next two or three years. Had I then broken away, gone to some other city before I became conspicuous, and supported myself respectably, as, with my varied cleverness, I could have done, no doubt you would forgive me that childish misstep and love me the more. Nor could that brief past ever be raked up; at all events it would be next to impossible. But I persisted in that life for thirteen years: until I was bored and satiated, until something more satisfactory offered. Were I penitent now, I might inspire your sympathy, be worthy of it; but I would not give up one of those years of misery, of vice, of horrors, if I believed that—as I do—they played their part with the coincidently progressing brain in developing that depth and intensity of genius which makes me the greatest Isolde the world will ever see. I regret nothing—nothing! And for that reason I hold myself to be the worst woman alive, and am prepared to see you turn your back and walk out without comment. I shall not ask you to stay!”