I was not going to spoil his pleasure.
"I am probably a little excited," I answered. "And the manager of the Graz theatre has just accepted the opera."
"That is splendid!" cried dad.
"Does he pay well?" asked the mater.
"That's the boy's affair," grumbled Daniel Cooper, turning to her. "You mind your own business."
A bell rang, and dad and my mother went into their box, while I hurried back to my seat.
During the whole act of the banquet I could not find my senses. What was I to do with Mitzi? I could not possibly ignore the incident. I asked myself whether she was not too much an artist to be a wife. What, if frivolity were unavoidable in the dramatic art, the most corporal and difficult of all, but the only one in which woman could grow up to the highest genius?
These doubts spoiled the second act for me. Yet I saw how lovingly she was stroking Macbeth's forehead, like a nurse who would cool the burning brow of a sick man. I saw, too, how she smiled at the ghost, how she mocked him, and I heard how she sang the words: "What, quite unmanned in folly?" and afterwards: "Fie, for shame!" exactly as I had taught her, slowly, softly, and more like a warning than a reproach.
There was even less applause after the second act than the first. However, Doctor Bernheim, whom you know as a sensible, judicious man, came and heartily congratulated me.
"In this particular case," he said, "the success cannot be measured from the applause. The public is much too moved to applaud loudly. Instinctively they fear to destroy the atmosphere."