“I was traveling on air when I left, I can assure you. His company was famous. Its engagement had been most successful. Madame Poppenheim was singing with it, and there were other famous names. There were only two more concerts, concluding his New York engagement, but he had told Madame Maretzek that if I chose to come and sing on these occasions, he would be glad to have me. I was more than glad of the opportunity and agreed to go. We arranged with him by letter, and, when the evening came, I sang.
“My work made a distinct impression on the audience and pleased Mr. Gilmore wonderfully. After the second night, when all was over, he came to me, and said: ‘Now, my dear, of course there is no more concert this summer, but I am going West in the fall. Now, how would you like to go along?’
“I told him that I would like to go very much, if it could be arranged; and, after some negotiation, he agreed to pay the expenses of my mother and myself, and give me one hundred dollars a week besides. I accepted, and when the Western tour began, we went along.”
“How did you succeed on that tour?”
“Very well indeed. I gained thorough control of my nerves in that time and learned something of audiences and of what constitutes distinguished ‘stage presence.’ I studied all the time, and, with the broadening influence of travel, gained a great deal. At the end of the tour my voice was more under my control than ever before, and I was a better singer all around.”
HER FIRST EUROPEAN TOUR.
“You did not begin with grand opera, after all?”
“No, I did not. It was not a perfect conclusion of my dreams, but it was a great deal. My old instructor, Mr. O’Neill, took it worse than I did. He regarded my ambitions as having all come to naught. I remember that he wrote me a letter in which he thus called me to account:
“After all my training, my advice, that you should come to this! A whole lifetime of ambition and years of the hardest study consumed to fit you to go on the road with a brass band! Poh!