Aurait de tant d'horreurs dicté l'ordre effroyable?
and passed on to the passage,
O Dieu, confonds l'audace et l'imposture!
At first her timidity was so great that she was almost inaudible, but at the fifth and sixth lines the charm which the words possessed for her began to absorb her thoughts, to take her out of herself into the region of poetic feeling, to spur and stimulate and strengthen her. Nature had given her tones full of tenderness and power, and capable of many varying emotions, and the dramatic instinct, which was either inherited or innate in her, made her give wholly unconsciously the just expression, the true emphasis, the accent which best aided the meaning of the verse, and best shaped its harmonies and grace.
Her first embarrassment once passed, the animation and spirit natural to her returned; her intuitive perception made her lend the required force and feeling to each verse; she could have recited the whole of the play with ease, so familiar to her were the lines of all the few volumes she possessed. Night after night, in her little balcony, when everyone slept except herself and the nightingales, she had declaimed the speeches sotto voce for her own delight, living for the hour in the scenes they suggested, and forgetting all the more sordid details of the existence which surrounded her, seeing only the moon and the sea and the orange flowers. At any other time her meridional accent, her childish exaggeration of emphasis, and southerner's excess of gesture, would have incurred the ridicule of her hypercritical auditor. But now the critic was in the mood to be kind and to be easily pleased. She closed her ears to the defects, and only noted with approbation the much there was to praise and to approve in the untaught recitation of a girl of fifteen, who had never seen a stage or heard a recital in the whole of her short life.
Damaris paused abruptly, and with a startled look, like one awakened out of dreamland into rough reality.
'I beg your pardon, I forgot myself,' she said stupidly, not well knowing what she meant and hardly where she was.
She did not hear the eager praises of the gentlemen about her; she only heard the sweet cool voice of the woman who was her judge, and who had listened in impassive silence:
'My dear, you have talent,' said that voice. 'Perhaps you have even genius. With all that music in your shut soul you must not marry Gros Louis.'
Damaris looked at her wistfully, with all the colour hot in her face, and her heart beating visibly. Then, she could not have told her why, she burst into tears.