And Stella,--how does she pass her time? Four times a week she takes a singing-lesson,--two private lessons, and two in della Seggiola's 'class,' besides which she practises daily for about two hours at home. She is at liberty to spend the rest of her time in any mode of self-culture that pleases her. She can go, if she is so inclined, to the Rue Richelieu with her mother, or visit the Louvre alone, can attend to little matters at home, or read learned works and write extracts from them in the book bound in antique leather which her mother gave her upon her birthday.
What wealth of various and interesting occupations and pleasures for a girl of twenty-one! It is quite inconceivable, but nevertheless it is true, that in spite of them she feels lonely and unhappy,--grows daily more nervous and restless, and, without being able to define exactly the cause of her sadness, more melancholy. Her energetic mother, to whom such a vague discontent is absolutely inconceivable, reproaches her with a want of earnestness in her studies and induces a physician to prescribe iron for her.
What is there that iron is not expected to cure?
To-day Stella is again alone at home; her mother has gone out after lunch to take her bird's-eye view of Paris from the top of an omnibus. She has graciously offered to take Stella with her, but Stella thanks her and declines; she detests riding in omnibuses, on the top she grows dizzy, and inside she becomes ill.
"Well, I suppose the only thing that would really please you would be to drive in a barouche-and-pair in the Bois," her mother remarks. "Unfortunately, that I cannot afford." With which she hurries away.
Stella's throat aches; she often has a throat-ache,--the specific throat-ache of a poor child of mortality who has learned to sing with seven different professors, and whose voice has been treated at different times as a soprano, a mezzo-soprano, and a deep contralto. She has been obliged to stop practising in consequence, to-day, and has taken up a volume of Gibbon, but is too distraite to comprehend what she reads. It really is strange how slight an interest she takes in the decline of the Roman Empire.
"And if I should not succeed upon the stage, if my voice should not turn out well," she constantly asks herself, "what then? what then?"
Why, for a moment--oh, how her cheeks hum as she recalls her delusion!--she absolutely allowed herself to imagine that---- How bitterly she has learned to sneer at her fantastic dreams!
"Has Edmund Rohritz's wife not yet been to see you?" Leskjewitsch had asked her mother in a letter shortly before. "You do not know her, but I begged Edgar awhile ago to send her to you,--she would be so advantageous an acquaintance for Stella."
"She would indeed," the poor child thinks; "but not even his old friend's request has induced him to do me a kindness."