derby hat, and pouring it on the earth as libations to Pallas
Athene, as he always called me. And he was not in the least drunk, if
you will believe me, only fearfully Russian.

When they left the pension their luggage at the station consisted of a
pile of shabby hand-baggage, mostly newspaper parcels. The girl had no
purse but a soldier's little coin case of goatskin, so Frau von A----
emptied her own bag, and stuffed L----'s possessions into it. Their
indifference to all these things which would all have been regulated and
in keeping with their position if they had belonged to any other country
than Russia, I believe was quite typical and seemed to me rather
sublime.

S---- afterwards made a trip round the world. Goodness knows how he
found out whether I was singing or not, but some night after singing one
of my big roles I would receive a monstrous basket of red roses, or an
armful of orchids, cabled for from Honolulu or China. He even remembered
my _Dachshund's_ birthday, and cabled the baker to send Peter a
wonderful _Torte_ with birthday candles.

CHAPTER XX

THE GRANDMOTHERS' BALLET

All this time I was working very hard at the opera. Our repertoire was
very large, including nearly all the Italian operas, from Verdi to
Wolf-Ferrari, and the German operas from the time of Weber and Mozart up
to Humperdinck. Everything was given in German, some of the translations
good and some poor. At first it had seemed terribly difficult to
accustom myself to the German sounds in _Dalila_ or _Carmen,_ after the
sonorous French, but latterly German came to seem quite as natural,
though never so beautiful nor singable. Every one in the audience,
however, understood the text, and surely this is the important thing.
How can they enter into the spirit of an opera when they are guessing
whether that is a love phrase or an insult that the tenor is singing?
The prejudice against translating into the vernacular has had to be
overcome in nearly all European countries and will, I suppose, be only a
question of time with us. In Russia, operatic composers flowered and
reached their world prominence only after the Russian language was used
for the libretto. In Germany Italian was discarded for the language of
the singers only after a long struggle, but the great abundance of
German operas came after it was adopted, not before. In France also
Italian libretti were used for generations, but can any one imagine a
Debussy composin