Tell me not now.”
Julia herself, as she listened, found her own music more interesting than she had imagined it. Polly, when she had finished, turned around with an amused expression:
“Well, well, I am perfectly surprised that you are so sentimental, Julia Bourne.”
“Oh, nonsense!” responded Julia, “but you sing it like an angel.”
“Yes,” said Polly, “this time I’ll accept the compliment without protest, for with your leave (or without it) I’m going to sing this at the next Idler. I’ve been asked to sing something, and I’ll take care to let every one know that you are the composer of this sentimental ode. You! the stern person who used to frown on me last spring when I wanted to go to Riverside on canoe expeditions that meant a solitude à deux. Ah, Julia, this song shows that you are human like the rest of us;” and Polly held high above her head the manuscript that Julia tried to seize.
Thus Julia made her first appearance before her fellow-students as a composer, for Polly sang “Tell me not now” with great effect that Friday afternoon; and Julia, who hitherto had had comparatively few acquaintances outside of her special set, now found herself an object of interest to the whole club.
“The next thing,” said Ruth, with genuine pride in Julia’s triumph, “the next thing we’ll have you composing an operetta.”
“Nonsense!” cried Julia. “An operetta! I couldn’t do it.”
“Why not? Three or four operettas have been composed and given by Radcliffe girls with great success. Why, I came out with my mother the year ‘A Copper Complication’ was given, and I never saw anything more entertaining in my life. What one girl can accomplish another can, I mean if she has the same kind of talent. Why, there have been several Radcliffe operettas—‘Princess Perfection,’ ‘A Copper Complication.’”
The urgings of Polly and Ruth, however, might not have led Julia to take up the work had not the Emmanuel Society needed funds. It had committed itself to assist in maintaining a reading-room at the North End for working girls, and its expenses had been heavier than the first estimates. In no way could money be so readily raised as through an operetta, and as Julia was especially interested in this Society, she at last consented to see what she could do.