"I'd like to
sing another part to-night. This is the sort of evening I fancy, when
there's something to do. Let me see: I have to sing in 'Trovatore'
Wednesday night, and there are rehearsals for the 'Ring' every day this
week. Consider me dead until Saturday, Dr. Archie. I invite you both to
dine with me on Saturday night, the day after 'Rheingold.' And Fred must
leave early, for I want to talk to you alone. You've been here nearly a
week, and I haven't had a serious word with you. TAK FOR MAD, Fred, as
the Norwegians say."

VIII

THE "Ring of the Niebelungs" was to be given at the Metropolitan on four
successive Friday afternoons. After the first of these performances,
Fred Ottenburg went home with Landry for tea. Landry was one of the few
public entertainers who own real estate in New York. He lived in a
little three-story brick house on Jane Street, in Greenwich Village,
which had been left to him by the same aunt who paid for his musical
education.

Landry was born, and spent the first fifteen years of his life, on a
rocky Connecticut farm not far from Cos Cob. His father was an ignorant,
violent man, a bungling farmer and a brutal husband. The farmhouse,
dilapidated and damp, stood in a hollow beside a marshy pond. Oliver had
worked hard while he lived at home, although he was never clean or warm
in winter and had wretched food all the year round. His spare, dry
figure, his prominent larynx, and the peculiar red of his face and hands
belonged to the choreboy he had never outgrown. It was as if the farm,
knowing he would escape from it as early as he could, had ground its
mark on him deep. When he was fifteen Oliver ran away and went to live
with his Catholic aunt, on Jane Street, whom his mother was never
allowed to visit. The priest of St. Joseph's Parish discovered that he
had a voice.

Landry had an affection for the house on Jane Street, where he had first
learned what cleanliness and order and courtesy were. When his aunt died
he had the place done over, got an Irish housekeeper, and lived there
with a great many beautiful things he had collected. His living expenses
were never large, but he could not restrain himself from buying graceful
and useless objects. He was a collector for much the same reason that he
was a Catholic, and he was a Catholic chiefly because his father used to
sit in the kitchen and read aloud to his hired men disgusting
"exposures" of the Roman Church, enjoying equally the h