Honor’s soft mouth was firm. “No,” she said. “I don’t care. I want their money.” McIvor shook his head.
The girl stared at him. She was fearless and obstinate. Not easily did she let go a purpose. “Mr. McIvor,” she said at last, “you don’t understand. I’ve got to make money. And my voice is my one way. Thank you for listening. You know everything, and I very little, but—people who can judge have told me I could do a lot with my voice—and I’m going to. You say yourself it’s a good—machine. I’ve—I’ve—” She was half sobbing with angry distress. Yet she was determined. “I’ve planned my career, and I’ll stick to it. I’ll succeed. I’ll make lots of money. You’ll see.”
Suddenly she whirled and, springing down the steps, ran full tilt across the lawn to a break in the lattice, and dropping to the ground, slid through like a rabbit.
McIvor looked up at Barron. The two men laughed a little, and then the musician sighed. “The poor baby,” he said. “She’s got so much, and she’s likely goin’ to throw it away. Money! At seventeen! An’ she with the face of a seraph and a voice out of ten million!”
“Perhaps she’ll grow up. She’s only a baby,” Barron considered, and went on to explain a bit to the other how things were at the Mannerings, and the influences that had shaped the motherless girl.
“If,” said McIvor, “she has the right stuff, life will come along some day with a big emotion, and money and such trash will go smash. And the world will get one of its great music-makers. But a singer without a soul is no good.”
Two years after the McIvor episode the Mannering household had changed little outwardly. But young Eric had been now for a year a practising lawyer, with a beginning of a reputation already, and Honor, secretary to Henry Barron, president of the Empire Knitting Mills, was a capitalist. She had fifteen hundred dollars salted away in a savings-bank.
“When it’s two thousand I’ll bolt for New York,” she told Barron, “and in six months from that I’ll be a success. You’ll see. Stroble says my voice is better and better.”
About that time she awoke with a start to a huge movement in the world; the world was swaying on its foundations, and she in her self-centred little orbit suddenly was shaken. America was at war. On a day it came to her what war meant. It was Eric, chafing at his lameness, his helplessness to fight, Eric burning with patriotism, who roused her. The boy had developed into a speaker of promise, and was being used at a variety of meetings. One day an older speechmaker said to him:
“Make them sing something before you begin. It limbers an audience and focusses its attention. It does your first five minutes’ work for you.”