"And I am an amateur listener, the most humbly appreciative, uncritical soul on earth. Please sing. Mrs. Hazard, if you have any influence with this administration will you not use it here?"
"Authority is better than influence," said Lola. "Elise, march to that piano."
Elise complied with an exaggerated air of obedience.
"Since I am singing under orders, I will sing only according to orders. What shall it be?"
"Sing My Rosary," said Lola. "That's an old one—and the dearest."
"I commend to you Mrs. Hazard for sentiment, Mr. Rutledge. Her honeymoon is not yet on the wane." Having thus made Lola responsible for the song, Elise sang it without further delay or hesitation.
When she had well begun to sing Rutledge recalled having heard that song a long time before. It had not impressed him.
Elise sang simply. The fullness of her low voice and the clearness of her words, together with the unaffected "heart" in her singing, left her nothing to be desired as a singer of ballads. As Evans listened to the song of sentiment of Mrs. Hazard's choosing he reformed his opinion of it. Always hitherto he had deemed sentiment an effervescence—refreshing at times as apollinaris, but none the less an effervescence—and the words of My Rosary a fair type of it:
"The hours I spent with thee, dear Heart,
Are as a string of pearls to me.
I count them over, every one apart,
My rosary, my rosary.
"Each hour a pearl, each pearl a prayer
To still a heart in absence wrung—
I tell each bead unto the end
And there a cross is hung.
"Oh memories that bless and burn,
Oh barren gain, and bitter loss.
I kiss each bead, and strive at last to learn
To kiss the cross, Sweetheart,
To kiss the cross."
But with Elise sitting there before him, a vision of loveliness and grace entirely, appealingly feminine, "the lady" all gone, and the girl—the woman—unaffected, natural, singing of love with such an air of truth and faith: sentiment became a very real thing to Rutledge.... When she finished he was silent. To comment would have been to comment on Elise, and for her every drop of his blood was singing, "I love you, I love you." He felt that if he spoke to her he must crush her in his arms and tell her so.