And with a quick breath and a slight stiffening of her shoulders she began singing the scale upward from middle c—sitting there with her sewing in her lap. I listened closely. Heretofore she had usually begun to miss the eighth-tone intervals when she reached a and b. Now she took them perfectly. I could not detect the slightest inaccuracy of pitch. I noticed that she kept to a marked rhythm, all the way up. The upper c she held, with a sudden triumphant glance at me, and trilled on it, very softly.
It brought me to my feet. “Come,” I said gruffly, “we'll take that down on the machine.” She followed into my room, explaining eagerly as she watched me putting on the cylinder—“You see, to-day, I realized all at once that I've been downright stupid about it. It occurred to me that singing with a rhythm might carry me right along through it. And then besides I just stopped fussing, and made up my mind that of course I could do it. I can do it again, too. You'll see.”
She promptly did it again. Again and again, as rapidly as I could put on new cylinders. I seized the occasion to make twelve records. Then we both listened attentively while I played them all over. There was not the slightest doubt that ten were perfect—or so nearly perfect that they satisfied us. And that is near enough. My hands trembled as I put each cylinder back in its box and carefully wrote the labels. Oh, it has been a tremendous day, this day!
She stood right over the machine throughout this performance—and we must have been an hour at it. I asked her to sit, but she laughed a little and said she was too excited.
When the labeled boxes were all carefully put away in a drawer of my bureau, where no accident short of fire could reach them, I came to her and took her two hands. Then suddenly I could not say anything at all.
But she looked right at me, and returned, very frankly, the pressure of my hands, and smiled, though there were tears in her own eyes.
“I'm so glad,” she said. “You just don't know—I've wanted so to be of use—”
She gently tried to withdraw her hands. I released one, but, still unable to speak, clung to the other; and hand in hand we walked to the French window and stepped out, side by side, on the narrow balcony. Then I let her hand go, and we leaned on the railing and breathed in the sweet April air.
