that inherits a singing
throat from a long line of choristers and learns to sing as it learns
to talk, has a likelier beginning. Any great achievement in acting or
in music grows with the growth. Whenever an artist has been able to
say, 'I came, I saw, I conquered,' it has been at the end of patient
practice. Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for
receiving discipline. Singing and acting, like the fine dexterity of
the juggler with his cups and balls, require a shaping of the organs
toward a finer and finer certainty of effect. Your muscles--your whole
frame--must go like a watch, true, true to a hair. That is the work of
spring-time, before habits have been determined."

"I did not pretend to genius," said Gwendolen, still feeling that she
might somehow do what Klesmer wanted to represent as impossible. "I
only suppose that I might have a little talent--enough to improve."

"I don't deny that," said Klesmer. "If you had been put in the right
track some years ago and had worked well you might now have made a
public singer, though I don't think your voice would have counted for
much in public. For the stage your personal charms and intelligence
might then have told without the present drawback of inexperience--lack
of discipline--lack of instruction."

Certainly Klesmer seemed cruel, but his feeling was the reverse of
cruel. Our speech, even when we are most single-minded, can never take
its line absolutely from one impulse; but Klesmer's was, as far as
possible, directed by compassion for poor Gwendolen's ignorant
eagerness to enter on a course of which he saw all the miserable
details with a definiteness which he could not if he would have
conveyed to her mind.

Gwendolen, however, was not convinced. Her self-opinion rallied, and
since the counselor whom she had called in gave a decision of such
severe peremptoriness, she was tempted to think that his judgment was
not only fallible but biased. It occurred to her that a simpler and
wiser step for her to have taken would have been to send a letter
through the post to the manager of a London theatre, asking him to make
an appointment. She would make no further reference to her singing;
Klesmer, she saw, had set himself against her singing. But she felt
equal to arguing with him about her going on the stage, and she
answered in a resistant tone--

"I understood, of course, that no one can be a finished actress at
once. It may be impossible to tell