'Till I was eighteen, and then, just as I was fit for something better, and to earn more money, my master spoiled his own game.'
'How so?'
'He wanted to marry me. I reckon he thought he could secure me best that way. If he had not asked me, and himself pestered me about this, I would have stayed with him and let him have a share—a lion's share, of my earnings; but he would not leave me in peace—he spoiled his own game by that, and set me free. I left him.'
'And then?'
'Oh! I have been independent since then. I have sung in America, but I have met with most success in Germany. I go about where I will. I have no master. I earn enough to enable me out of the opera season to go to the mountains or the seaside. This is a dull spot, and I would not have made so long a stay in it had it not been that I was ordered to the elevated air here, because I had suffered from a relaxed or overstrained organ. Now you know my story. What do you think of it?'
Philip was watching her face, and feeling as if he received a shot in his heart every time she turned her splendid full eyes on him, and his hands trembled as they held the stone. 'Ever since I left my red-bearded master I have been alone—alone in the world; I have had no one to whom to cling, no mind to which to go for advice in times of doubt and distress. Alone—do you know what it is to be alone?'
'Yes,' said Philip; he let sink his head on his breast, and looked down into the water. He also had spent a lonely youth, but in what opposite circumstances!
'You can have no idea,' she continued, 'how I have longed, with agony of heart, for someone—someone whose judgment I could trust, whose mind was superior, whose experience had been made in just those departments of life to which I am strange. I have longed for such an one, whom I could regard as a very dear friend, and to whom I could go in trouble and perplexity. But I have no one! For all these years I have been as much alone as the man in the moon.'
Philip put his hand to his collar. He tried to straighten the points which had become limp—his hand shook so that he could do nothing with them; he was being burnt up, consumed, by her eyes which were on him as she spoke of her desire to find a friend.
'Is it not strange,' she said, 'that I who have been preaching freedom should feel the need of a bar—not of many, but just one to hold by. Do you know what it is to stand at the verge of a precipice? To stand on a spire top where there is sheer abyss on every side? Can you imagine the giddiness, the despair that comes over one? My place is one surrounded by precipices, dangers, everywhere; I see hands thrust out to give me the push to send me over, but not one—no, not one—to hold me.'