Miss Farrar's favorite recreation is "sleep—and much of it!"
As for books, she likes "everything."
"I read a great deal," she commented. "When I was studying 'Madame Butterfly,' I read everything I could find about the Japanese. I tried to imbue myself with their spirit. I bought up old prints, and pictures, and costumes; I learned how they eat, and sleep, and walk, and talk, and think, and feel. I read books on the subject in French and German, as well as in English."
Incidentally it came out that she memorized this most difficult of operas in fifteen days.
"No, I am never afraid of forgetting my lines." Then, tapping her forehead lightly, she added: "When a thing is once learned, it seems to stick in a certain corner of your brain and stay there."
There was youth and girlishness in her off-hand manner of making this remark. In fact, the artist and girl are constantly alternating in the play of her features, and it is fascinating to watch this hide-and-seek of youth and maturity.
The girl-spirit was uppermost now, as she sank back comfortably in her big arm-chair, drew her Frenchy peignoire more snugly about her, and related some of the droll contretemps that occur on the opera-house stage.
"The audience never seems to see them, but the most ridiculous things happen, and then it is terrible when you want to laugh, but dare not."
A mention of Lilli Lehmann suddenly sobered the conversation. Lilli Lehmann is Geraldine Farrar's teacher—"and a very severe one"—her pupil asserts.
"But she—and all Germans—appreciate personality. That is why I have been allowed to develop my own ideas—to be individual. That is, to me, the most interesting part of the art. I am keenly interested in observing life—the expression of people's faces, their way of saying and doing things. Wherever I am, whatever I see, I am always finding something to use in my art.