e inevitable separations of the actual
stage-scene, and I think she regretted the necessity for these!) This
figure was Barbara Jencks's, and hers were the cool, uncompromising
eyes into which the enraptured devotee gazed when he followed his card
into the drawing-room, hers the strong and knuckly hands that put his
flowers into water and his more valuable expressions of regard back
into their velvet cases, previous to re-addressing them. She drove
with Margarita, when Sue Paynter did not, and would have ridden with
her, I verily believe, had not Carter and I volunteered to supply that
deficiency.

It was she who received that astonished and, I fear, disappointed kiss
from the German officer at Brussels, when the students drew
Margarita's carriage home from the opera house after her astonishing
triumph in the last act of _Siegfried_. It was an absurd part for
her--she had never done _Elsa_ nor _Elizabeth_, and Mme. M----i was
very angry with her. Herr M----l, the great director, spent the
summer in Italy and Switzerland and was with our party nearly all of
the time. Purely to please himself he taught Margarita the role of
_Bruenhilde_ in _Siegfried_ and insisted on her singing it that winter
in Brussels under him. It was wonderful, and showed me what her real
_forte_ was to be. She was _Bruenhilde_, she did not need to act it.
How the Master himself would have revelled in her!

She was very teachable--one of the most certain indications of her
great capacities. Her _Marguerite_ was almost entirely her own, for
she had not learned how to use dramatic instruction; her _Aida_ was
almost Madame's own, for she had learned, then, and besides, did not
understand the character; her _Bruenhilde_ was herself, trained and
assisted into the best canons of interpretation by a loyal Wagnerian.
It is a short part, of course, but it showed what she could have done
with the rest of it. At thirty-five she could have done the whole
_Ring_; at forty I believe no one could have equalled her.

Carter got himself snarled hopelessly into a tangle with the
government officials in Berlin (he was no diplomat, though a good
fellow, and wild about Margarita, so that poor little Alice had more
than one bad quarter-hour, I'm afraid) and it took Roger a great deal
of Bradley influence with the American consul and a lot of patient
correspondence to unravel his unlucky brother-in-law. This gave Roger
a good excuse for being in and near Germany; wheth