as ice, every one. But this one--Monsieur, I have
seen many _Marguerites_, I who speak to you, but never before has it
arrived to me to envy that fat _Faust_!"

And I (to whom he spoke) believed him thoroughly, I assure you. Though
I doubt if the portly tenor was much flattered, for he had accepted
the role with the idea of carrying off the honours of the evening,
and exhibited, in the event, not a little of that acrimony which is so
curiously inseparable from any collection of the world's great
song-birds. Ever since Music, heavenly maid, was young, she has been
so notoriously at variance with her fellow-musicians as to force the
uninitiated into all sorts of cynical conclusions! Such as the
necessity for some kind of handicap for all these harmonies, some
make-weight for these unnaturally perfect chords. And it is but due to
the various artists to admit that they supply these counter-checks
bravely.

Well I suppose they would be too happy if it were all as harmonious as
it sounds, and we should all (the poor songless rest of us) kill
ourselves for jealousy! And if the fat _Faust_ had really been as
supremely blissful as he should have been when Margarita, with that
indescribably lovely bending twist of her elastic body, drooped out of
her canvas, rose-wreathed cottage window and threw her white arms
about his neck in the most touching and suggestive abandon I have ever
seen on the operatic stage--why, we should have been regretfully
obliged to tear him to pieces, Roger and I and Walter Carter (I am
afraid) and the well-preserved Frenchman!

She was not so philosophical as Goethe nor so saccharine as Gounod,
our Margarita, and I don't know that I am more sentimental than
another; but when the poor child in all her love and ignorance and
simple intoxication with that sweet and terrible brew that Dame Nature
never ceases concocting in her secret still-rooms, handed her white
self over so trustfully to the plump and eager _tenore robusto_, a
sudden disgust and fury at the imperturbable unfairness of that same
inscrutable Dame washed over me like a wave and I could have wept like
the silly Frenchman.

Do not be too scornful of that sad and sordid little stage story, ye
rising generation--it is not for nothing that the great stupid public
of older days, ignorant alike of Teutonics and chromatics, but wise in
pity and terror, as old Aristotle knew, took it to their commonplace
hearts! Do not trouble yourselves to explai