Then I heard her step, and her voice; and looked up to find her standing over me. She was actually smiling—a resolute smile.
“Forgive me, Anthony,” she said. And then, before I could exclaim at this, she added, enthusiastically, like the girl she often seems—
“Let's make the new scales now!”
For a moment I could only look at her, wondering at her astonishing buoyancy of spirit. Then, as she was herself carrying my phonograph to the table and adjusting the horn, I got up—still heavy and a thought bewildered—and brought a box of cylinders.
While I was at this, she walked a few times to the window and back, swinging her arms freely, like a boy, and inhaling deep breaths. Her collar evidently confined her throat, for she tore it open with an unconscious vigor that displaced a hook and sent it flying against the window. She seemed not to notice this. She swung up on the balls of her feet and ran through a number of vocal exercises. It thrilled me to hear again that wonderful voice, with the firm resonance and the fine quality that always, to me, makes her seem something more than woman.
“It's a wonder I can bring the tones out at all,” she observed, half to herself. “I have n't sung a note for days.”
Next she began running scales; very carefully and precisely, her eyebrows puckered into an intent frown. And I watched her white throat, and round chin, and delicately curving mouth.
She caught me looking at her, and flashed a smile at me. Then, with her eyes on mine, took in a quick deep breath that filled her chest out solidly, and, full voice, broke into the old familiar waltz song from “Romeo and Juliet.”
I knew then that I had never really heard her sing before. She saw the surprise on my face, I know, for her eyes suddenly sparkled anti sprung away from mine and she flushed with pleasure; but she went right on with the song—sang it clear through, managing the lace-like coloratura work with perfect ease and precision, unconsciously throwing her whole body into the glorious, swaying rhythm of the waltz, and letting out a volume of tone—of sheer, luscious tone, without a particle of “wood” in it—that filled the room, that would have filled the greatest opera house in the world, that throbbed about my ears and set my emotions vibrating in harmony with it and with the mood of the singer that animated it.
When she had done, I stood motionless there. It seemed to me that echoes of that wonderful voice were still floating to my sense-consciousness from every quarter of the shabby little room. I know that I hail to look out for a moment at the sunlight on the roofs beyond the window, and myself take in a deep breath that, I fear, was half a sigh.