As if she were pleading with a judge, Thurley, who all in an instant swept from her savage little self everything she had fancied she believed, found herself beginning with admirable logic,
“I was born in Thurley, Idaho, so they named me Thurley. Just think—if I hadn’t been born until the next day, it would have been Hoskins, Idaho! So far luck was with me!”
Half an hour later she ended with, “I shall never go back to the Corners, and I shall pay Miss Clergy for all she is doing, no matter if she has no need of the money. And I shall never marry any one! You see that was my one promise to Miss Clergy. At least not for twenty years, she said, because by that time she would be dead and could haunt me if I went to behaving foolishly.”
Hobart smiled at her as genially as he had smiled at Miss Clergy, remarking, “Ah, the de luxe Topsy, I take it! I much prefer a Topsy prospect to a Little Eva prospect with a myriad of interested relations who feel certain I cannot comprehend the wonderful way their Little Eva sings ‘Madame Butterfly,’ proving it with clippings from the music column of the Standing Stone Gazette! After all, no one is really interested in you. I take it Miss Clergy is keen on seeing you cheat a man of love; isn’t that it?”
“Yes,” loneliness swept over Thurley for the instant, “I don’t suppose any one really cares about me, because the people who did care I ran away and left.” She caught her underlip quickly.
“Then the decks are cleared for action,” Hobart said with relief. “Before you sing to-day, let me add that the greatest lesson to learn in order to be a genius, no matter in what capacity, is to be impersonal. Talent is personal. That is why you have so excellent a foundation.”
“Always impersonal?”
He shrugged his shoulders, impatient of the interruption. “We can’t tell when I haven’t even heard you sing. My dear child, were I to map out destinies for every one who comes to me, I should be quite mad. As it is, to be the ‘final judgment’ takes the disposition of a dove and the constitution of a lion. You’ll see what I mean later on. You have had so little education in one way that it will be hard for you to catch up. You’ll have to work without ceasing. But you don’t look like a shirker.”
“I’m not,” she said, hating herself for the flat remark.
“There are two kinds of persons in this world,” he mused, rising and going over to the piano, “those who wait for a dead man’s shoes and those keen enough to employ their own bootmaker. I never hear any one sing unless I judge them to be of the last class and so,” sitting down and magically running his fingers over the keys, “tell me—what can you sing?”