avorite, sang
"Cavaradossi." Taken as a whole, the performance was quite as good as any
one has a right to expect any opening night to be. The big audience which
went away good-naturedly satisfied, had had its moments of really
stirring enthusiasm. Fournier scored a well deserved triumph with a
"Scarpia" that was characterized by a touch of really sinister
distinction. Hastings, incapable as he was of subtleties or refinements,
did as usual all the obvious things pretty well and got the welcome he
had so rightly counted upon. But Paula fell unmistakably short of winning
the smashing success she had so ardently hoped for.

She did not, of course, fail. Wallace Hood, to take him for a sample of
her admiring friends, went home assuring himself that her success had
been all he or any of the rest of them could have wished. And he wrote
that same night a letter to John Wollaston out at Hickory Hill saying as
much. Her beauty, he told John, had been a revelation even to him and
there could be no doubt that the audience had been deeply moved by it.
Her acting also had taken him by surprise. It was a talent he had not
looked for in her and he was correspondingly delighted by this
manifestation of it. In the great scene with Fournier when he stated the
terms of his abominable bargain to her, Wallace had hardly been able to
realize it was Paula that he saw on the stage.

When it came to her singing (he knew John would want his most impartial
honest judgment)--here where he had been surest of her, she came nearest
to disappointing him. It was a shame, of course, to subject a lovely
voice like hers to singing in the great vacancy of all outdoors, to say
nothing of forcing it into competition with a shouter and bellower like
Hastings. But he felt sure when she was a little better accustomed to her
surroundings, she would rise superior even to these drawbacks.

This was somewhere near the facts, though stated with a strong friendly
bias. Paula was nervous, never really got into the stride of her acting
at all. The strong discrepancy between Fournier's methods and Hastings'
served perhaps to prevent her getting into step with either. And she sang
all but badly. There had been only one rehearsal in the pavilion and at
that she had been content merely to sketch her work in, singing off the
top of her voice. When she really opened up at the performance, the
unfamiliar acoustics of the place frightened her into forcing, with the
result t