answer can I give the baroness?"

"Is any positive answer required?" she said. "Why should I have told
you how I prize music, except to explain that I will never become a
drawing room teacher, that I would rather starve than share in the
universal sin of the jingling, bungling profanation of what I hold
sacred?"

"And yet you do not disdain to give lessons to a soubrette?"

"How do you know?"

"Because--well, because I've enquired about you. I must be able to
answer for a person whom I recommend to houses like that of the
baroness."

"Very well. I will tell you why I take this frivolous creature; from a
motive which will be perfectly obvious to you, as you too are
interested in home missions:--to save a soul."

"You want to transform this stage princess, who has already passed
through so many hands, into a saint? You're jesting."

Christiane laughed, a short, hollow laugh, utterly destitute of mirth.

"What do you take me for?" she asked. "To make a person something which
I myself neither am nor desire to be! And what has her mode of life to
do with me? I'm willing to allow everybody to be happy in their own
way. What I call saving her soul, is giving her an idea of true music.
The girl has the most enviable talents, voice, ear, passion, the
genuine, the natural musical sympathy, which in all such compositions
instantly opens to her the real meaning of the author or the part, so
that she not only repeats the notes, but reproduces the whole meaning
to the life. This is rare, even among those who consider themselves
great artists, and are paid as such. And that's why this stage princess
as you choose to call her, is too high for Offenbach, and, indeed,
perfectly capable of interpreting Mozart and the other great masters."

"And if you succeed, do you really believe that this rescued soul will
be made any happier?"

"Who can tell? I merely do what lies in my power. Happy! If music alone
could give happiness, few would possess such joy as mine. But it's only
a substitute, perhaps the most powerful and noble, but not the real
thing, not happiness itself. Of that I'm perfectly sure; I've had time
to experience it."

"And what do you consider real happiness?"

She was silent a moment, not as if it were difficult to answer, but as
if considering whether she owed the questioner any reply.

Then in a tone of cold resignation she said suddenly:

"Real happiness? I only know because I have never tasted it. Real
h